  Landauer's analysis led to the argument that measurement did not reduce the degrees of freedom needed to represent the combined system of object and measuring device, so did not lead to the necessity of heat generation. The models of measurement proposed by Szilard, Gabor and Brillouin were insufficiently general. Landauer's early papers did not explicitly consider the Szilard engine and the problem of Maxwell's demon, so they did not address what implications this had for the consistency of statistical mechanics. It appears that Landauer believed that logically reversible computation could not be achieved without accumulating a large amount of irrelevant information. That accumulation would ultimately require erasure, so that the cost of a logically irreversible computation could not be avoided. It took Bennett to demonstrate that this cost could be avoided in logically reversible computation.