8: The Computer in Business and Industry
The government, of course, is not the only user of the electronic computer. Business is faced with the same problems as government, plus others perhaps, and can use the same techniques in planning, producing, merchandising, and keeping track of its products. To General Electric goes the distinction of first installing the large-scale electronic computer for its business-data processing. This was done quite recently, in 1954. Commenting on the milestone, the Harvard Business Review said in part:
The revolution starts this summer at General Electric Company’s new Appliance Park near Louisville, Kentucky. The management planning behind the acquisition of the first UNIVAC to be used in business may eventually be recorded by historians as the foundation of the second industrial revolution; just as Jacquard’s automatic loom in 1801 or Frederick W. Taylor’s studies of the principles of scientific management a hundred years later marked turning points in business history.
It is early yet for comment from historians, but the growth of the business computers from the pioneer UNIVAC bears out the theme of the Harvard Business Review suggestion. In 1961 there were 6,000 large electronic computers in use; General Electric alone has more than 100. One big reason for this is the fact that government is not alone in its output of paperwork. It has been estimated that one-sixth of our Gross National Product, or about $85 billion, is devoted to paper-handling. In the time it takes to read this chapter, for example, Americans are writing 4 million checks, and this is only a small part of the paperwork involved in the banking business.
General Electric Co., Computer Dept.
First National Bank of Arizona personnel operate sorters during initial operation of a new GE-210 computer-controlled data-processing system. The sorters process bank checks at the rate of 750 per minute as printer (foreground) prints bank statements at 900 lines per minute.
Wholesale banks have been called fiscal intelligence agencies, doing business by the truckload, and measuring the morning mail by the ton. Yet this information is dealt with not only in volume, but in precise and accurate detail. If a client asks about the rating of a customer who has just ordered several million dollars worth of goods, the bank may be called on to furnish this information in a very short time, even though the customer resides halfway around the world.
Since they deal in figures, it is logical that banks were among the first businesses to be computerized. Many of us are aware of those stylized numbers now on the bottom of most of our checks, and vaguely conscious that through some mysterious juggling by computers called ERMA and other such names banks balance our accounts at electronic speed.
Insurance companies were next in line as computer candidates. Like banking, insurance is believed to have been available to Babylonian merchants thousands of years ago. In those days there were fewer people, and probably claims were fewer; the abacus was the only computer needed to keep pace. But since insurance was introduced on the North American continent, coincidentally in the same state, Pennsylvania, as banking, it has been threatened with drowning in a sea of its own policies.
The computer is ideally suited for doing the work of the insurance business. There is no question today that the computer has taken over from the insurance clerk. One firm installed computers in 1953 and since then has doubled its accounts and tripled dollar volume, without hiring the 250 additional people who normally would have been required for such an increase. Eight outlying offices have been closed, yet service is better and faster, agents’ commissions are paid twice a month instead of only once, and actuarial computations that once took six months are now done in a week.
A computerized world is of course not without its problems. The computer system is so efficient, in fact, that the same outcry is going up from labor as was heard in the days of the first industrial revolution. It has been said with some truth that automation upgrades jobs, and not the workers themselves. The change-over from quill pen to pushbutton console will take some time and cause some pain, but in the end our gain will be as great a stride as we have made since the days of the introduction of the first factories with their more efficient production methods. Surely the business worker already has been freed from the tedium of adding columns of figures and much filing, and given pleasanter work in exchange.
The Shopper’s Friend
After banking and insurance, which businesses yield to the lure of high-speed automatic data-processing? Department stores are dabbling, and supermarkets too are beginning to use the computer. The A & P stores are studying such a system, as is the Liggett Drug Company. At first the computer looked attractive as an inventory and ordering tool; now it is headed in the direction of automating the actual shopping operation.
In Paris, a retail grocer made merchandising history by displaying more than 3,000 different items in a floor space of only 230 square feet. The trick is in a punched-card system that automatically registers and prices any item the buyer selects. At the check stand the card is run through a computer which figures the bill and orders the groceries, which are automatically selected from the warehouse and delivered in a cart to the purchaser at the door!
A similar automatic supermart system is being pushed by Solartron—John Brown, Ltd., in England. The computerized scheme works much like the French one. The shopper inserts a card in the slot beside the item she wants and a punch marks it in alpha-numeric code for item and price. If more than one item is desired the card is reinserted. With each punch, the machine slices off a bit of the edge of the card so that it slides deeper into the slot next time. At the cashier’s station, the card is placed in a computer. Fifteen seconds after she has paid for them, the shopper is delivered her groceries. Besides the saving in time for the shopper, there is a saving for the grocer in floor space and also the elimination of the loss through shoplifting. About the only thing that might seem to be against the new system is the psychology of the large display, which motivation researchers tell us stimulates volume buying.
With this factor in mind, an official of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc., has suggested retaining the large stocks on display, but coding them with fluorescent paint of certain wavelengths to correspond to price. The shopper fills her cart even as in the conventional store, but at the mechanized checkstand an electronic eye on the computer scans and prices the items while they are being automatically packaged. The doubting Thomases say of this system that the packager will probably put the eggs on the bottom, along with the tomatoes and ice cream!
The advertising journal Commercial Art comments sadly on this accepted fact of automation in the market place:
The checkout clerk is doomed, that last survivor of human warmth in most of today’s supermarkets. His eventual executioner will be the electronic computer, of course. Pilot systems using computers for automatic checkouts are already drawing a bead on the jovial little man in the green smock. Eventually even he will disappear from the faceless canyons of our sleek supermarkets.
But the writer finds a ray of hope in the conclusion of his editorial.
Skilfully designed packages can strike an emotional chord in the consumer, can create strong brand preferences even in the absence of product differences. Supermarkets can give the appearance of being a friendly, “human” place to shop even if the only humans visible are the customers.
To make more complete the rout of conventional merchandising by the computer-oriented system is the plan to automate even the trading stamp. American Premium Systems, Inc., a Texas firm, is developing a plan in which the customer receives a coded plastic card instead of a stamp book. When he makes a purchase, a card is punched with the number of credits he has earned. By means of a centralized computer, an IBM 1401 in this instance, records are kept continuously, and when the customer has accrued 1,500 points he receives a premium automatically. The obvious advantage here is to the customer, who is spared the messy task of licking thousands of evil-tasting multicolored stamps, and the danger of losing the book before redemption. But the storekeeper profits too. He does not risk the loss or theft of stamps, nor does he buy stamps for people who are not going to save them. The complete system will call for an IBM 7074 and represents an outlay of about $3 million to service some 6 million customer accounts.
Before leaving the area of merchandising, it might be well to mention inventory management in general and the effect of the computer upon it. Applying what is known as “conceptual order analysis,” one marketer who is using computers in his business talks of “warehousing without bricks or mortar.” With a confidence born of actual testing, his firm expects one day to have no inventory except that on his production lines or in transit to a customer. This revolutionary idea is based on practically instantaneous inventorying, production ordering, and delivery scheduling. While the warehouse without bricks or mortar is not yet a fact, research discloses many manufacturers who have already cut their standing inventories, from small amounts to as much as 50 per cent, while maintaining customer service levels. This was done using what by now are “standard” electronic information-handling methods. The implication here is of the computer not merely as a data-handler, but as a business organizer and planner as well.
Electronic Ticker Tape
The stock market lends itself to the use of high-speed data-processing, even though a Wall Street man achieved notoriety some time back as the first embezzler to use computer techniques. Admittedly it is harder to track down the hand in the till when it pushes buttons and leaves no telltale fingerprints or handwriting, but computerization continues despite this possible drawback. The same firm has added digital computers to one of its offices for faster service. The American Stock Exchange installed $3 million worth of new processing equipment to provide instantaneous automatic reports on open, high, low, close, bid, asked, and volume-to-the-moment figures.
International Business Machines Corp.
On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, representatives of Thomson & McKinnon and IBM discuss a model of the computing system which will speed transactions from the offices of the brokerage houses in 41 cities to the New York and American stock exchanges.
The stock market’s need for the computer lies in the usual two factors: tremendous paperwork and increasing pressure for speed. Trading of stock amounts to about three-fourths of a billion shares in a year, and occasionally 3 million shares a day change hands. A major brokerage house has confirmations to handle on thousands of trades, dividends to credit to nearly half a million active accounts, and security position and cash balances to compute for each customer. The increasing amount of business, plus the demand for more speed and accuracy, make the computer the only solution.
Simply reporting the results of the day’s marketing in the newspapers is a monumental task. The Associated Press is installing a system based on an IBM 1620 computer, in which ticker information will also be given in the computer for sorting, comparison, tabulation, and storage. At the correct time, the machine will print out the format for publication in the press at the rate of 4,500 words a minute. With a memory of 20 million characters and a capacity for 600,000 logical decisions each minute, the computer keeps up with stock information practically as fast as it is received, and even a late ticker will not mean a missed newspaper deadline. Associated Press expects to be able to transmit the stock-market results to its papers within fifteen seconds after the ticker closes. Not just in the United States but in Japan as well, the computer is invading the stock market. The abacus is out, and now the exchange in Tokyo is using an advanced UNIVAC solid-state computer to process transactions.
Versatile Executive
It is this high-volume capacity, speed, and accuracy that makes the computer a welcome new employee in most business operations. An example is the Johnson’s Wax system linking its facilities for rapid management reaction to changing conditions. Headquarters is linked to twenty three warehouses and sales offices, and today’s work is based on yesterday’s inventory instead of last month’s.
Computers schedule hotel reservations, and handle accounts payable and receivable for the hotel industry. Auto-parking, now a $500 million a year business, leans ever more heavily on computers for ticket-issuing, car-counting, traffic direction, charge-figuring, and collection. The freeway too has its computers, though there have been minor setbacks like that on the New Jersey Turnpike where an automatic toll-card dispenser was mistaken by slow-thinking people for a collector and its working was jammed with coins and battered by abuse when no change was forthcoming! Man will take some educating as the machine finds wider employment.
The computer has been seen in the publishing business primarily as a tool for searching lists and printing addresses. Now it is beginning to take over more important duties such as typesetting. The new daily Arizona Journal is the first newspaper to make use of this technique.
From use in other businesses, the computer has grown to fostering a business of its own. An example is in the production of payroll checks by specialty firms, and safeguarding against bad checks with such services as Telecredit, a computer-run system that spots bad checks upon interrogation from its member stores.
In Waterbury, Connecticut, a computer helps home-buyers and realtors by listing all available homes in the area. Three reports are produced: a total listing, a listing by style, and a listing by price. Bell Telephone in New York uses a computer system to deliver its 9 million directories to subscribers in the city and suburbs. The rapid system permits changing of delivery orders even while the books are at the printers. A computer method of making sausage recipes is now available to all packers. Remington Rand developed this application at its UNIVAC Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University.
Communication
Communication is a vital part of all business, and the digital computer finds another application here. A technique known as adaptive control was recently presented at a symposium by scientists from IBM. Special-purpose computers integrated into communication networks would make possible the “time-sharing” of channels and cut costs per message sharply. Another digital computer, an inexpensive “decision threshold” device, is being pushed as a means of reducing errors in the transmission of messages. These logical uses of the computer were presaged in the 30’s when Shannon wrote his pioneering circuit-logic paper, and in the late 40’s with his work on information theory.
TV Station KNXT in Los Angeles uses a digital computer to control the complicated switching necessary during station breaks. This electronic juggling of live shows, commercials, and network programming is called TASCON, for Television Automatic Sequence Control. It can be programmed hours before use, and then needs only the push of the button instead of frantic manual switching that occasionally throws the human operator.
Not just the mechanics of transmitting the commercials on TV, but even the billing and other accounting functions are a major computer project. To handle close to $700 million a year in payments, an IBM 7090 computer is being used. There are more than 5,000 TV stations in the country, with billings dependent on a complicated structure of 180 different rates. As a result, there is an undesirable lag in payment. Putting records on tape and feeding them to the computer is expected to clear up the trouble and provide a bonus in the form of advising stations on discount rates for programming on a current basis.
The computer isn’t content with skirting the edges of the advertising game, of course. A heated battle is going on now in this industry over the growing use of the computer to plan campaigns and actually evaluate ads, a task held by some to be the exclusive domain of the human adman with his high creative ability. The Industrial Advertising Research Institute triggered the fight by using a computer to study 1,130 advertisements appearing in the industrial journal Machine Design and select the best black-and-white and the best color ads.
While diehards snorted ridicule, the computer made its choices. IARI then compared its selections with those made by two of the largest and most experienced rating firms. On color ads, the computer scored 66 per cent, rating two out of three ads practically the same as the human selectors. With black-and-white it did even better, scoring 71 per cent. Its detractors, assuming of course that the human raters were infallible, gloated that the computer was a flop, that it could pick only the average ads accurately and fell down on excellent and poor ones.
The agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn thought otherwise and is using the computer in its advertising. As a tool for media selection and scheduling, BBDO likened the computer to a power shovel instead of a spade. The new method makes it possible to compare thousands of combinations a second. Another firm, the Simulmatics Corporation, agrees with BBDO. The computer, it says, will permit advertising campaigns far more effective than those waged at present, since the most efficient campaign may be too complex to be devised without artificial aid. The key to the Simulmatics system is the “media mix model” in which a hypothetical campaign can be tried out in advance in the computer.
Young & Rubicam differs hotly with computer advocates. A spokesman leveled a low blow at the computer, suggesting that it will have difficulties forming motivational research based on Freudian analyses! The firm says no way has yet been found to transpose “Viennese fatuities” into Arabic numerals. It deplores the turning of a media-planner into a rubber stamp as media selection becomes an automatic reiteration which “those with an abacus could pipe to a stale and sterile tune.” The battle rages, but the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion. Either the computer will sway Madison Avenue from Viennese fatuities, or it will learn about sex.
Industry
We have discussed the computer in business; perhaps it would be well to stress that this includes industry as well. The computer not only functions in the bank and brokerage house, insurance office, and supermart, but also is found increasingly in jobs with oil refineries, chemical plants, surveying teams, knitting mills (a likely application when we remember Jacquard), and steel mills. As automation takes over factories, it brings the computer with it to plan and operate the new production methods. Transportation too is making good use of the computer. Freight-handling in the United States, Canada, England, and the U.S.S.R. is using machine techniques.
Our high-speed airplanes are already more aimed than flown, and less and less seen and seen from. Mach-3 aircraft are on the drawing boards now, aircraft that will fly at three times the speed of sound or about 2,000 miles per hour. An airliner taking off from London must already be cleared to land in New York. So authorities on both sides of the ocean are concerned. In England, giant computers like the Ferranti Apollo and others are on order. There is talk in that country too of integrating military and commercial aviation into one traffic control system. In the next ten years the sky population may double again, in addition to flying faster, further crowding the airlanes and particularly the space adjacent to airports. The only solution to this aerial traffic jam lies in the electronic computer.
Not as spectacular as air traffic control, but important nonetheless, is the job of planning the route an airliner will fly. United Air Lines uses a Bendix G-15 to select flight plans for its big DC-8’s. In a manner similar to the NANWEP course-planning described for surface vessels, the computer examines a number of possible routes for the big transports, considering distance flown, wind, temperature, weight and fuel requirements, and time schedules.
This flight-planning was originally done by manual computation and required an hour to work out details for only one possible flight plan. The computer method was demanded because of the increased speed of the big jets and their sensitivities to weather conditions en route. The computer examines a number of tentative plans in minutes and selects the one which will make the optimum use of winds aloft, temperatures, weather, and so on. If weather changes en route require it, the pilot can call the planning center no matter where he is and request that the computer work out a new flight plan.
Once the optimum flight plan has been figured, an electronic computer in the aircraft itself may one day assure that the desired flight path is actually flown. The ASN-24 computer, developed by Librascope, Incorporated, and the Air Force, weighs only thirty-one pounds, yet performs more than 20 million computation steps in a six-hour flight. The electronic navigator, with information from Doppler equipment and other navigation aids, evaluates which is the best “fix,” weighing for example the relative accuracies of a Loran fix and a dead-reckoning fix. The computer even shoots celestial fixes and plots the results! Obviously faster than its human monitor, the electronic navigation computer solves navigation problems with an error as small as one part in 32 million.
A broader use of the computer in aircraft is proposed by the Convair Division of General Dynamics. Because today’s airplane is far more complicated than those ten years ago, and those ten years hence will extend this trend, the firm feels that checkout of the aircraft will require electronic computers. While adding about 3 per cent to the total cost of the plane, such equipment could perform a variety of functions including maintenance analysis and would add an hour a day to the profit-making flight time.
There would be no profit for the airlines with the best flight planning and in-flight control in the world if there were no passengers aboard; the “traffic problem” extends from the sky to the ticket counter. For this reason most airlines have already recruited the computer for another important job—that of ticket reservation clerk. An example, recently installed by United Airlines, is the “Instamatic,” a giant, far-flung system weighing 150 tons and requiring 12,000 miles of circuits. Instamatic cost $16 million and can handle 540,000 reservations in a single day. So complex is the computer system that it requires 40,000 printed-circuit boards, 500,000 transistors, and 2,000,000 ferrite memory cores. But it gets the job done, and any one of 3,000 agents all over the country can confirm space on any flight, anytime, within seconds!
There are other systems used by competing lines, systems called Sabre, Teleflite, and so on. But Remington Rand UNIVAC has proposed an over-all system that will make any of them look like a child’s do-it-yourself walkie-talkie. The UNIVAC plan is for a single interline reservation system, used by all twenty-four domestic airlines. Called AID, for Airline Interline Development, the new scheme would cost the airlines only 12 cents per message, and could be tied in with foreign carriers for international bookings.
Remington Rand UNIVAC
Console for airlines reservation system permits pushbutton booking of space.
Present methods of reservations among airlines require from less than a minute for easy bookings to several hours for the tough ones. The AID system uses a dial phone, with direct lines to a central computer in Chicago. The response to the dialed request is an immediate voice answer. If space is available, the computer also stores all the needed information for the reservation and transmits a teletype message to the boarding point of the proper airline.
To go back another step, the aircraft on which the computer confirms seat space was most likely built with the help of another computer. A typical production system is that used by Lockheed in its Marietta, Georgia, plant. There an IBM 305 RAMAC computer keeps track of 45,000 parts orders continuously. The result is better and faster operation, and a saving to Lockheed of $3,500 a month. In California, Lockheed is using a computerized data acquisition system called EDGE, for Electronic Data Gathering Equipment, that feeds production information directly into a computer memory for analysis and action orders. Remote reporting stations can be operated by production-line workers and will relay production data to the central computer. Although the Lockheed EDGE system will cost more than $600,000 a year, officials feel that it will save the company three times that at the outset, and perhaps more when wider use is made of its potential. An interesting feature is the tying together of Lockheed’s widely separated plants at Sunnyvale, Palmdale, and Van Nuys, California.
North American Aviation links its complex of plants in the Los Angeles area by microwave, even bouncing beams of data from reflectors atop Oat Mountain where there is no direct line-of-sight path between the different locations. Douglas Aircraft maintains a data link between California and Charlotte, North Carolina, to permit use of computers over a distance of 2,400 miles.
The airlines are also using computer inventory systems to control their stock of spare parts. Material costs represent 60 per cent of airline revenue and are rising; some larger carriers have investments of as much as $75 million in spare parts. It takes the computer to control the flow of repairable parts through the shop efficiently, schedule the removal of those requiring periodic checks, spot high-use items, and so on.
As an example of the complexity a large airline faces in its maintenance, TWA stocks 8,000 different replaceable items. When such parts are needed, they must be on hand where they are needed, but overstocking can lead to financial ruin. To match increasing competition, airlines find it necessary to resort to the laws of probability and other sophisticated statistical techniques in stocking parts. Fed such equations, the computer can match ten to twelve man-years of work in three hours, and mean the difference between an oversupply of parts in New York with outages in Los Angeles, and properly balanced stocks.
The ramifications of the computer in the airplane industry are far-reaching. For example, Boeing has recorded the lessons it learned on its Bomarc missile program in computers so that it can retain and apply them on its Minuteman and Dyna-Soar programs. The computer will thus keep track of men and their projects and warn them of previous mistakes. Modern management techniques such as PERT and PEP, favored by the government, make good use of the computer.
The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation is primarily a builder of planes and space vehicles, but it has found itself in the computer business too as a data-processing center. Installing computers for its own engineering and business uses, McDonnell soon began selling computer time in off hours to banks and other businesses. It now has a computer valuation of about $10 million and operates around the clock.
The Designing Computer
It seems strange that the computer was a bookkeeper and clerk for years before anyone seriously considered that it might be an engineer as well, yet the men who themselves designed the computer were loath to use it in their other work. Part of this resistance stems from the high premium placed on the creativity of research and design work. The engineer uses science in his work, to be sure, but he professes to use it as an artist, or with the personal touch of, say, a brewmaster. There is another possible reason for the lag in computer use by the men who should appreciate its ability the most. In the early days of the computer, it clacked away all week figuring payrolls, and perhaps writing checks. That’s what it was ordered for, and that’s where the money was—in the businessman’s application of the computer.
To be sure, the military was using the computer for other purposes, but the average scientist or engineer not employed by Uncle Sam had access to an electronic computer only on Sunday, if at all, when the big machine had done its primary work and could take a breathing spell. To further compound excuses for the foot-dragging engineer, there was a difference in needs in payroll computation and scientific mathematical calculation. Commercial computers are designed for a high rate of input and output, with a relatively slow arithmetic going on inside. The engineer, on the other hand, might need only several minutes of computer time, but it could take him a couple of days to put the problem into a form the machine could digest.
Slowly, however, enough engineers fought the battle of translation and forewent Sunday pursuits like church, picnics, and golf to learn haltingly how to use the electronic monster. It took courage, in addition to sacrifice, because the computer was pooh-poohed by some sharp scientific brains as an idiot savant at best. Behind the inertia there could have been a touch of concern too—concern that the machine just might not be as stupid as everybody kept saying it was.
Heavy industry made use of the machines. The steel plants, petroleum and chemical plants, and even the designers of highways were among the early users of computer techniques. There was of course good reason for this phenomenon. Faced with problems involving many variables and requiring statistical and probabilistic approaches, these people could make the best use of machines designed for repetitive computations. The refiner with a new plant in mind could simulate it in the computer and get an idea of how, or if, it would work before building his pilot plant. Today the notion of dispensing with even the pilot plant is getting serious consideration.
One program used by a gasoline producer analyzed thirty-seven variables and thirty-seven restrictions, a matrix that could never be evaluated by ordinary methods. Textile fiber research is another example, with thread tests run on dozens of samples and averaged statistically for valid conclusions. B. F. Goodrich put the computer to work in its laboratories at such tasks as multiple-regression studies of past production of processes like polymerization and the running of a batch of new material on the computer.
These applications were accomplishing a two-fold benefit. First, years were being telescoped into weeks or even days; second, complete investigation rather than sketchy sampling was possible. Optimum solutions took the place of the guesswork once necessary because of the lack of sufficient brainpower to run down all the possibilities. Still there were scientists and designers in other fields who shook their heads loftily and said, “Not for me, thanks.” The computer was but a diligent clerk, they held, relieving the engineer of some onerous chores. It could do nothing really creative; that must be left to man and his brain.
By now many industrial firms had purchased or rented computers for the technical people so that they would not have to fight for a place in line at the payroll computer. Civil engineering agencies, perhaps a hundred strong, used computers to design bridges and plan and lay out highways. Designers at the Tudor Engineering Company of San Francisco put its Bendix G-15D to work planning the highway that Contra Costa County will need in 1980. Almost all of our fifty states now use computers in their highway departments. In 1960, Georgia solved more than a thousand highway bridge design problems in its computers. Besides doing the work faster and cheaper, the computer produces a safer product. For example, if substandard materials are programmed in, the computer will print out a warning or even stop working altogether so that the error can be corrected.
Steel companies, like Jones & Laughlin, use computers not only to run production mills, but also as research tools. Three hours of operation of a new furnace can be simulated in the computer in thirty seconds. Tracing the steel back to its ore, the computer is used again. The Bureau of Mines has used the machines for several years; they are helpful in problems ranging from open-pit operation, grades of ore, drill-core data logging, reserve calculations, and process control.
General Electric Co., Computer Dept.
Computer operation of Jones & Laughlin steel mill.
Gradually, then, the resistance was worn down. Grudgingly at first, and accepting the computer only as an assiduous moron, engineers in other fields put it to work. Complex machine operations like gear-shaping were planned and carried out by computers that even punched out tapes for controlling the production tools. Optics designers switched from desk calculators to electronic computers. Mechanical engineers in jobs from ultrasonic vibrators to tractor design became users of computers. Mass spectrometry, heat-exchanger design, and waterworks design joined the jobs the computer could do.
The computer had figured in plotting trajectories for missiles, and in the production of aircraft; engineers found it could design them too. Back in 1945, an analysis of twenty-one different flight conditions at each of twelve stations of an airplane fuselage took 33 days and cost more than $17,000. Today, by using a high-speed computer instead of a desk calculator, the analysis is completed in a day and a half, at a cost of $200!
The last of the diehards seemed to be the electronics people themselves. A survey conducted by a technical journal in the field showed that in 1960 many designers were not using computers in their work. Admitting that the computer was a whiz just about everywhere else, the electronics engineer still could say, “The machine is great on paperwork, but I do creative work. The computer can’t help me.” Other reasons were that computers were expensive, took much time to program, and were helpful only with major design problems. Fortunately, all designers do not feel that way, and progress is being made to put the computer to work in the electronics field. It is helping in the design of components (Bendix saves ten man-hours in computing a tenth-order polynomial and associated data) and of networks (Lenkurt Electric saves close to 250 engineering hours a week in filter network design). Bell Telephone uses the computer approach in circuit analysis, and Westinghouse in the design of radar circuitry. It is interesting that as we move up the design scale, closer to what the engineer once considered the domain of human creativity, the computer still is of great value. In systems design it is harder at the outset to pin down the saving in time and the improvement in the system (the latter is perhaps hard to admit!) but firms using computers report savings in this field too.
One interesting job given the computer was that of designing the magnetic ink characters to be used in its own “reading” applications. This project, conducted by Stanford Research Institute, is typical of the questions we have begun to ask the computer about its needs and ways to improve it. A larger scale application of this idea is that of letting the computer design itself. Bell Telephone Laboratories developed such a system, called BLADES, for Bell Laboratories Automatic Design System, to design a computer used in the Nike-Zeus antimissile defense system.
A wag once noted that the computer would one day give birth to an electronic baby. His prophecy came true perhaps quicker than he anticipated, but there is one basic difference in that the progeny is not necessarily a smaller machine. The giant LARC, for instance, was designed by lesser computers. As A. M. Turing has pointed out, it is theoretically possible for a simple computer to produce a more complex one. This idea is borne out in nature, of course, and man is somewhat advanced over the amoeba. Thus the implication in the computer-designed computer is far more than merely the time and money saved, although this was certainly a considerable amount. The BLADES system in twenty-five minutes produced information for building a subassembly, a job that required four weeks of manual computation.
Notable improvements in the general-purpose computer are doing much to further its use as a technical tool. Present machines do jobs as varied as the following: personnel records, inventorying, pattern determination, missile system checkout, power-plant control, system simulation, navigation, ballistic trajectory computations, and so on. Special computers are also provided now for the engineer; and among these is the Stromberg-Carlson S-C 4020 microfilm recorder. Engineering specifications are put into the computer and the machine can then produce on request mechanical drawings as required by the engineer. Data stored in the memory is displayed on a Charactron tube. There is little resistance to this type of computer, since the engineer can say it is doing work below his level of ability! Of course, the draftsman may take a dim view of computers that can do mechanical drawing.
Bell Telephone Laboratories
Engineer checks design information for first computer built from complete information furnished by another computer. Shown is a subassembly of the computer, which will be used in the Army’s Nike-Zeus antimissile defense system.
After a rather hard to explain slow start, then, the computer is now well established as a scientific and engineering tool. Blue-sky schemes describe systems in which the engineer simply discusses his problem with the machine, giving specifications and the desired piece of equipment. The machine talks back, rejecting certain proposed inputs and suggesting alternatives, and finally comes up with the finished design for the engineer’s approval. If he laughs overly loud at this possibility, the engineer may be trying to cover up his real feelings. At any rate the computer has added a thinking cap to its wardrobe of eyeshade and work gloves.
Digital Doctor
Medical electronics is a fairly well-known new field of science, but the part being played in medicine by the computer is surprising to those of us not close to this work. Indicative of the use of the computer by medical scientists is a study of infant death rates being conducted by the American Medical Research Foundation. Under the direction of Dr. Sydney Kane, this research uses a UNIVAC computer and in 1961 had already processed information on 50,000 births in ninety participating hospitals. Punched-card data include the mother’s age, maternal complications, type of delivery, anesthetics used, and other pertinent information. Dr. Kane believes that analysis by the computer of this information may determine causes of deaths, after-birth pathological conditions, and incapacity of babies to reach viability. A reduction in infant mortality of perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 annually is believed possible as a result of the studies.
Another killer of mankind, cancer, is being battled by the computer. Researchers at the University of Philadelphia, supported in part by the American Cancer Society, are programming electronic computers to act as cancer cells! The complexity of the problem is seen in the fact that several man-years of work and 500 hours of computer programming have barely scratched the surface of the problem. A third of a million molecules make up the genes in a human cell, and the actions of these tiny components take place many times faster than even the high-speed computer can operate. Despite the problems, some answers to tough chemical questions about the cancer cells are being found by using the computer, which is of course thousands of times faster than manual computation.
If you were discharged from a hospital in 1962, there is a chance that your records are being analyzed by a computer at Ann Arbor, Michigan as part of the work of the Commission on Professional and Hospital Activity. Information on 2-1/2 million patients from thirty-four states will be processed by a Honeywell 400 computer to evaluate diagnostic and hospital care and to compare the performance of the various institutions.
In the first phase of a computerized medical literature analysis and retrieval system for the National Library of Medicine, the U.S. Public Health Service contracted with General Electric for a system called MEDLARS, MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System. MEDLARS will process several hundred thousand pieces of medical information each year. New York University’s College of Engineering has formed a biomedical computing section to provide computer service for medical researchers. Using an IBM 650 and a Control Data Corporation 1604, the computer section has already done important work, including prediction of coronary diseases in men under forty.
The success of computers in these small-scale applications to the problems of medicine has prompted the urging of a national biomedical computer system. It is estimated that as yet only about 5 per cent of medical research projects are using computer techniques, but that within ten years the figure will jump to between 50 and 75 per cent.
An intriguing possibility is the use of the computer as a diagnostic tool. Small office machines, costing perhaps only $50, have been suggested, not by quacks or science-fiction writers, but by scientists like Vladimir Zworykin of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. Zworykin is the man who fathered the iconoscope and kinescope that made television possible. The simple diagnostic computer he proposes would use information compiled by a large electronic computer which might eventually catalog the symptoms of as many as 10,000 diseases. Using an RCA 501 computer, a pilot project of this technique has already gathered symptoms of 100 hematological diseases.
Another use of the computer is in the HIPO system. Despite its frightening acronymic name, this is merely a plan for the automated dispensing of the right medicine at the right time to the right patient, thus speeding recoveries and preventing the occasional tragic results of wrong dosage. More exotic is a computer called the Heikolator which is designed to substitute for the human brain in transmitting messages to paralyzed limbs that could otherwise not function.
The simulation of body parts by the computer for study is already taking place. Some researchers treat the flow of blood through arteries as similar to the flow of water through a rubber tube, analyze these physical actions, and use them in computer simulation of the human system. The Air Force uses a computer to simulate the physical chemistry of the entire respiratory and circulatory systems, a task that keeps track of no less than fifty-three interdependent variables.
Dr. Kinsey of the Kresge Eye Institute in Detroit is directing computer work concerning the physiology of the eye. According to Kinsey it was impossible previously to approximate the actual composition of cell substances secreted from the blood into the eye. Even those whose eyes no longer serve them are being benefited by computer research. The Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, uses an IBM computer to develop reading devices for the blind. These complicated readers use a digital computer to convert patterns of printed letters into musical tones. Further sophistication could lead to an output of verbalized words. Interestingly, it is thought that the research will also yield applications of use in banking, postal service, and other commercial fields.
Russia is also aware of the importance of the computer in the medical field. A neurophysiologist reported after a trip to Russia that the Soviet Union is training its brightest medical students in the use of the computer. Such a philosophy is agreed to by medical spokesmen in this country who state that no other field can make better use of the computer’s abilities. Among advanced Russian work with computers in the biomedical field is a study of the effects on human perception of changes in sound and color.
Visionary ideas like those of radio transmitters implanted in patients to beam messages to a central computer for continuous monitoring and diagnosis are beginning to take on the appearance of distinct possibilities. Some are beginning to wonder if after it has learned a good bedside manner, the computer may even ask for a scalpel and a TV series.
Music
The computer has proved itself qualified in a number of fields and professions, but what of the more artistic ones? Not long ago RCA demonstrated an electronic computer as an aid to the musical composer. Based on random probability, this machine is no tongue-in-cheek gadget but has already produced its own compositions based on the style of Stephen Foster. Instead of throwing up their hands in shocked horror, modern composers like Aaron Copland welcome the music “synthesizer” with open arms. Bemoaning only the price of such a computer—about $150,000—Copland looks to the day when the composer will feed in a few rough ideas and have the machine produce a fully orchestrated piece. The orchestration, incidentally, will include sounds no present instruments can produce. “Imagine what will happen when every combination of eighty-eight keys is played,” Copland suggests. Many traditionalists profess to shudder at the thought of a machine producing music, but mathematical compositions are no novelty. Even random music was “composed” by Mozart, whose “A Musical Dice Game” is chance music with a particularly descriptive title, and Dr. John Pierce of Bell Laboratories has extended such work.
Taken from “Illiac Suite,” by L. A. Hiller
and L. M. Isaacson, copyrighted 1957, by
Theodore Presser Co. Used by permission.
Random chromatic music produced by ILLIAC computer
resembles the compositions of some extreme modern composers.
Listen: [[audio/mpeg]]
In 1955, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and L. M. Isaacson began to program the ILLIAC computer at the University of Illinois to compose music. The computer actually published its work, including “Illiac Suite for String Quartet,” Copyright 1957, New Music Editions, done in the style of Palestrina. All music lies somewhere between the complete randomness of, say, the hissing of electrons in vacuum tubes and the orderliness of a sustained tone. No less a master than Stravinsky has called composition “the great technique of selection,” and the computer can be taught to select in about any degree we desire. Hiller describes the process, in which the machine is given fourteen notes representing two octaves of the C-major scale, and restricted to “first-species counterpoint.” By means of this screening technique, the computer “composed” by a trial-and-error procedure that may be analogous to that of the human musician. Each note was examined against the criteria assigned; if it passed, it was stored in memory; if not, another was tried. If after fifty trials no right note was found, the “composition” was abandoned, much as might be done by a human composer who has written himself into a corner, and a new start was made. In an hour of such work, ILLIAC produced several hundred short melodies—a gold mine for a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith! It was then told to produce two-voice counterpoint for the basic melodies. “Illiac Suite” is compared, by its programmers at least, with the modern music of Bartok.
Purists whose sensibilities are offended by the very notion of computer music point out that music is subjective—a means of conveying emotion from the heart of the composer to that of the listener. Be that as it may, the composition itself is objective and can be rigorously analyzed mathematically, before or after the fact. From a technical standpoint there seems to be only one question about this new music—who composed it, the programmer or the computer?
An interesting sidelight to computer music is its use to test the acoustics of as yet unbuilt auditoriums. Bell Telephone Laboratories has devised such a machine in its Acoustical and Visual Research Department. The specifications of the new auditorium are fed into the computer, followed by music recorded on tape. The computer’s output is then this music as it will sound in the new hall. Critical experts listen and decide if the auditorium acoustics are all right, or if some redesign is in order.
The Machine at Play
The computer’s game-playing ability in chess and other games has been described. It is getting into the act in other fields, spectator sports as well. Baseball calls on the computer to plan season strategy and predict winners. When Roger Maris began his home-run string, an IBM 1401 predicted that he had 55 chances in 100 of beating Ruth’s record. Workers at M.I.T. have developed a computer program that answers questions like “Did the Red Sox ever win six games in a row?” and “Did every American League team play at least once in each park in every month?”
An IBM RAMAC computer is handling the management of New York’s Aqueduct race track, and promises to do a better job than the human bosses, thus saving money for the owners and the State of New York Tax Commission. The Fifteenth Annual Powderpuff Derby, the all-women transcontinental air race, was scored by a Royal Precision LGP-30 computer, and sports car enthusiasts have built their own “rally” computers to gauge their progress. The Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria, will be scored by IBM’s RAMAC, and even bowling gets an assist from the computer in the form of a scoring device added to the automatic pin-setter, bad news to scorekeepers who fudge to boost their points.
An IBM 704 has proved a handy tool for blackjack players with a system for winning 99 per cent of the time, and rumor has it that a Los Angeles manufacturer plans to market a computer weighing only two pounds and costing $5, for horse-players.
Showing that the computer can be programmed with tact is the demonstrator that answers a man’s age correctly if he answers ten questions but announces only that a woman is over twenty-one. Proof that the computer has invaded just about every occupation there is comes to light in the news that a Frankfurt travel agency uses a computer called Zuse L23 as an agent. The traveler simply fills out a six-question form, and in a few seconds Zuse picks the ideal vacation from a choice of 500. Computers, it seems, are already telling us where to go.
Business Outlook
The computer revolution promises to reach clear to the top of the business structure, rather than find its level somewhere in middle management. The book, Management Games lists more than 30,000 business executives who have taken part in electronic computer management “games” in some hundred different versions. The first widely used such game was developed in 1956 by the American Management Association. While such games are for educational purposes, their logical extension is the actual conduct of business by a programmed computer.
In his book, Industrial Dynamics, Dr. J. W. Forrester points out that a high-speed digital computer can be used in analyzing as many as 2,000 variables such as costs, wages, sales, and employment. This is obviously so far beyond human capability that the advantage of computer analysis becomes evident. A corollary benefit is the speed inherent in the computer which makes it possible to test a new policy or manufacturing program in hours right in the computer, rather than waiting for months or years of actual implementation and possible failure. For these reasons another expert has predicted that most businesses will be using computer simulations of their organizations by 1966. Regardless of the timetable, it is clear that the computer has jumped into business with both its binary digits and will become an increasingly powerful factor.
Lichty, © Field Enterprises, Inc.
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