Differential Equations and Department Stores

Howard Aiken on the uses of computers, 1955:

If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the basic logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence I have ever encountered.

Update: Some people have read the quote above and thought Aiken was ignorant of the work of Turing et al. I assumed he was speaking in terms of what was practical rather than what was possible, which is apparently correct.

Thanks to Anatoly Vorobey in the comments below, I found a paper that goes into more background. From that paper:

Aiken's theme in the lecture ... was that a machine designed primarily for scientific use was far from ideal for business computing. ... For example, scientific computing (Aiken pointed out) involves relatively small amounts of data and complex processing, whereas business computing involves large amounts of data and relatively shallow processing.

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