It's interesting that these technologies acted as a brake or limiter on the compexities of the businesses/organisations that relied upon them - and this, IMO, w

It's interesting that these technologies acted as a brake or limiter on the compexities of the businesses/organisations that relied upon them - and this, IMO, was a good thing, as it meant by extension that the entire enterprise was comprehensible to humans. Contrast with today, where it is trivial to build software that enables - and thereby imposes - hugely complicated processes and rules, as often as not with little or no aggregate benefit. My go-to example here is WWII, where the western democracies were able to run hugely complicated beaurocracies for, inter alia, logistics and codebreaking, with superlative efficiency using little more than pen and paper (the use of computers in codebreaking being technical rather than administrative or procedural of course). If we found ourselves in a similar situation today there would be stormtroopers marching down Whitehall while our top brass were still in requirements capture workshops.