[Turing_Machine]

It's been going on for a long time.

In one of his memoirs, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke recalled his days as a young man working for the British bureaucracy (something to do with teacher pensions, as I recall). His particular job involved consolidating huge lists of figures into reports. He observed that the numbers in the reports were rounded to two significant figures, well within the accuracy of his slide rule, and started using the slide rule to do all his work.

He could finish his daily quota before lunch and take every afternoon off.