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Electronic Abacus
yoey writes: "Blast from the past in an article at the Economist: There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine at all. Others believe that there is a limited field for electronic methods, provided that they fit into, and do not disrupt, established business systems. But there is a third group ... who consider that a major revolution in office methods may be possible. This revolution would involve scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine and substituting a single 'electronic office' where the giant computor [sic] would perform internally all the calculations needed for a whole series of book-keeping operations, printing the final answer in and on whatever form was required."
We may smile complacently at how inscrutable the future was a few decades ago, but we ourselves are incapable of seeing beyond the Technological Singularity that will make our A.D. 2001 era seem even quainter than the time period of the referenced article.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
The intentions of business to increase productivity and reduce costs by utilizing electronic devices was wrough with good intentions in 1954. People were still agog with the value of the computers to tackle boring tasks during the war. (artillery trajectories) It only seemed natural to extend that to tasks in the business place that were always considered a royal pain in the ass...payroll...
What noone figured was the effect of personal computers on business. People still believe they increase productivity and decrease costs. This is the biggest lie out there. The use of the PC in the business has reached and passed the point of dimishing returns and really manay people could better serve companies by shoving the PC aside and getting out a good old pad of paper. We have so lost touch with reality. How many of you do nothing when you can't login or access the network?
Man was doing business for thouysands of years before computers and in reality much of business is still done without them. We (us folks with PC in our face) have experience in business without computing...shame on us.
is As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, in Atlantic Magazine, July 1945. They have a web page Prophets of the Computer Age with more interesting flashbacks.
it's called Microsoft Excel
e.g. MSExcel is the glue which holds together the banking sector's myriad specialist systems
The articles mentions that when the computer broke down the employees might get very upset. The fastest way I know to push employees into panic mode is to screw up payroll. Thus, the employees would be slaves to the machine much more than any conventional bakery. Is this a wise direction for society to be heading?
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Could you imagine if we had kept Pounds, shillings and pence and tried to change it now.
I wonder what the Suns headline would be? "decirubbish" followed up by "We don't need no fangled eurocratic decimalisation here!"
Strange to think, One and two shilling were still legal tendar about 10/12 years ago - as 10 and 5 pence pieces.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
if you like this sort of stuff, you should go and rent 'desk set,' with spencer tracy and katherine hepburn, 1957. it's normally classified as a 'zany romantic comedy,' hepburn is head librarian for a reference library at a large tv station, tracy is the efficiency expert brought in who threatens to replace hepburn and her librarians with a 'new computer' (read, large room sized box with flashing lights and whirling wheels ...).
A short list of things that won't work right. (please prove me wrong)
Voice recogniton software (that works)
Good search engines
high speed internet access at home (no really)
flying cars (its 2001 where the heck is my flying car?)
cheap household robots
wet wired computer hardware
traveling by car faster than by bicycle (traffic issues)
and many many more wonderful items that Iam too wacked out on caffine to think of
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared