This can be seen as a consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox.

It is called a paradox because seeing it in action usually catches people by surprise. And this is true whether you're talking about the consumption of coal to power factories, or the consumption of electricity to power computing (and in each case the myriad of new uses that efficiency promoted).

In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle. You see that in Asimov's work, in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and so on. Basically nobody anticipated ubiquitous computing. For instance in the Foundation series you see that a computer run by the Second Foundation can predict the future course of history...and people are calculating their courses with slide rules.

As for the killer app of computing, email, I'm only aware of one pre-1970 work correctly anticipating what it would be actually like. (James H. Schmitz has a memorable scene in one of his Telzy stories where she catches up on her messages at a terminal. He doesn't say "email", but the scene is notable for unobtrusively getting it right.)

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power asimov and manned-missiles

Good example.

Now compare with Franchise, Jokester, All the Troubles of the World, The Last Question and many more stories that feature as a plot device a very powerful centralized computer named Multivac. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac for a more complete list.)

How the same mind could have come up with the idea of androids with positron brains following the three laws of robotics, and yet missed pocket calculators baffles me.

Heinlein predicted electronic calculators shortly after WWII in Space Jockey. The space ship has a little calculator, while the big computer is on a space station. That's more or less in line with late 60s or early 70s tech. I think a lot of science fiction has predicted 20 years out pretty well. It's past that that it usually goes off the rails, only because of the inherent difficulty of predicting the future.

> In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle.

In many ways we're doing that exact thing. The computer at my desk is powerful but somewhat useless; the grand oracle in the form of Google et. al. does the real heavy lifting of giving me useful information. Whether it's a single computer or a bunch of separate ones acting as a whole is pretty immaterial in that sense.

"Desk Set" has a job stealing computer with a conversational UI answering reference questions. Ahead of it's time.

People saw plenty of value in more compute - what they didn’t see the need for was paying an astromical amount more for the same amount of compute to be miniaturized.

For example, in 1964, the ATLAS computer went fully online in Manchester, England. It was the most powerful computer in the world, took up a floor of a university, and the word “supercomputer” was invented to describe it.

The requirements for the Apollo Guidance Computer were to make something with those approximate specs, but take up only 24×12.5×6.5 inches (61×32×17 cm), use 55 watts of power and be ready to fly in 1967. It was a crazy, impossible task.

I’m convinced the AGC was the biggest computing advance after the move general purpose computers.

It was only really used for big expensive projects where the expense of the mainframe computer was a small part of the budget, so no.

People from the future will look back at us and ask:

"Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more electric power will give them back than ?"

Not that long ago (1980's?) it was said that no one really needed a personal computer, and that no one would buy one.

I programmed microcomputers in the 70s as a kid.

In the late 70's the rich boy of the neighborhood got a zx-spectrum clone (rich kids toy in Brazil at the time) but I was the only kid of the bunch that thought programming in basic was fun - all of my friends just wanted to load Kung Fu Mater[1] from the tape recorder. Crazy, games were stored into analog audio k7[2] tapes back then.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgO4HtWIJjQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape