@Alobar, I used to work for the organization you linked to, from '88 to '90, in Fairbanks. It was the most interesting place that I have worked in my career. I only recognize one person on the staff page though. I remember someone bursting into the lab saying there was an earthquake in SF and the World Series went off the air. About 15 minutes later, I watched the Alaska State Seismologist measure the trace width on the pen & ink seismographs, then measure the distance from Fairbanks to SF using a string on a globe(!), plug the numbers into a calculator, and give an Richter estimate only .2 off from the final computer determination.
The holdup to computer analysis then was a need for human analysts to hand-pick the arrival times of shock waves, often from very noisy data. At the time, Japan had about 100 government-funded instrument 'stations', each in a vault at the bottom of a deep, deep concrete well. Some of our 100 or so stations were buried in the dirt as deep as someone could dig during an hour or so of expensive helicopter time, and took lots of experience to distinguish small quakes from wind, moving the trees, moving the roots...
Not that long ago, in geezer years at least, total elimination of the U.S. Geological Survey was part of a serious budget proposal. I'm glad they weathered that storm, and have made such progress with their software.