[waldrews]

Back in the day, uniform random variates weren't that hard to come by, but if you wanted to simulate some normals, unless you wanted to do double table lookup plus maybe some interpolation, those tables were as convenient as it got.

[artisanscribble]

You say that, but generating uniform variates was itself a whole trick. Famously RAND put a lot of effort into creating a ton of them and publishing them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_1...