[34]. The Colligan quotes are from Joel Makower’s useful book Office Hazards: How Your Job Can Make You Sick, published 1981 by Tilden Press, Washington, D.C.
[35]. The material on the Manhattan word processor comes from Barbara Garson’s article in Mother Jones magazine, July 1981, p. 32.
[36]. See “Job Decision Latitude, Job Design, and Coronary Heart Disease,” by R. A. Karasek, who participated in a 1981 Purdue University conference on job stress. The Karasek findings appeared on pages 48-55 of Machine Pacing and Occupation Stress, a book published in 1981 by Taylor & Francis Limited, London. In Karasek’s words, “Job-design strategies advocating limited skill usage and decision authority for the majority of the workforce appear to be associated with a host of undesirable, unintended consequences ranging from skill under-utilization (and consequent productivity loss) to increased risk of coronary heart disease.”
[37]. Before Bell adopted the standard touch-phone numbers pad, it did a study showing the superiority of the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 arrangement. The study had strong financial motivations. After all, the more wrong numbers people dialed, the greater would be the cost to the phone company, since Bell at the time probably wasn’t charging anyone for wrong numbers.
[38]. For observations on the merits of various colors, see Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display Terminals, edited by Etienne Grandjean and E. Vigliani and published by Taylor & Francis Limited, London, 1982.
[39]. If you don’t want lines on a CRT to seem to be rolling into each other when you‘re using a bright background, you should worry about something called a refresh rate. That’s the number of times the picture “repaints” itself on the screen. Etienne Grandjean, the prominent Swiss expert on VDTs, recommends a rate of at least 80 cycles a second; others say it needn’t be so high. The Xerox 860’s rate is 70 cycles, according to David Eisen, and that’s better than average. Still, I noticed the roll, anyway. In a letter to me in January 1983 Grandjean also recommended a slow phosphor for use with the white background. That means the images would take longer to vanish from the screen than they would otherwise—reducing the perceived flicker.
[40]. Eisen’s advice on VDTs can be found in the booklet Humanizing the VDT Workplace: A Health Manual for Local Officers and Stewards, published jointly by the Newspaper Guild and the International Typographical Union (the price is $1.50 from the Guild, at 1125 15th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005).
[41]. The German requirement for detachable keyboards appears in paragraph 4.3.1 of Standard ZH1/618 of “Safety Regulations for Display Workplaces in the Office Sector,” as released by the Trade Cooperative Association, Central Office for Accident Prevention and Industrial Medicine.
[42]. The McIlvain example comes from PC Magazine, May 29, 1984.
[43]. The advice on keyboard height is from Military Standard 1472C, Human Engineering Design Criteria for Military Systems Equipment and Facilities, published by the army in May 1981 and summarized in the July 1982 Popular Computing.