Prototypes are almost always of this porportion. Consider the Transistor.
Bell Labs is the birthplace of the Transistor, inventing the device that led to a communications revolution.
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley discovered the transistor effect and developed the first device in December 1947, while the three were members of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.
Below is a picture of the very first transistor. Imagine today where we have millions of transistors in a single microprocessor.