Slashdot Mirror
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."
i've often heard about the LEO (Lyon's Electronic Office) being for the first business application of computing but have yet to see anything about the tech they used and how they developed the system. can anyone point me out to some online info?
this "computor" will never come close to the slide rule in efficiency, simplicity, and elegance. The slide rule will never be replaced by such a monstrous contraption. Besides, it really impresses the babes when displayed prominently in my breast pocket. ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
in the end, when some assistant accountant accidentally puts in a 20' cat5 cable as $200.17.
one less set of eyes to notice the mistake, 45 mote minutes on the phone for me.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
where the giant computor [sic]
Has [sic] ever appeared before in a Slashdot article? That amazed me. Granted, it was put there by the submitter, not an editor, but still that's pretty amazing.
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.
Thats all very well and good, but what happens when this megomanic computer encounters technical difficulties? Or needs updgrading? Or just rebooting?
What OS could it possibly run? Anything by Microsoft is out for obvious reasons, and even UNIX based systems aren't up and fully running 100% of the time...
"Had a terrible day at the office, hunny, the computer went down and we all had to *think*!"
- Phil
Good morning, Dave. What are you doing?
I have to go to the bathroom.
You've already been twice this morning, Dave. Perhaps you should cut down on the coffee.
Hal, let me in. I really have to go!
I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't let you do that. Please go back to your desk.
etc.
It will never happen! What do they think this place is? NASA?
This is excellent for those highly trained people needed to keep those things running. Even if someone invented a valve that was 100% reliable, tax laws change often enough that many operators will be needed to keep this computer up to date.
There were several big problems for all such devices before the invention of Solid state components. onw of these was reliability. Tubes (valves) burning out, etc. And the other was the hand manufacter nature of these devices. The end result was that the was an effective limit to the size that you could build these things before it was down for repair and maintenance most of the time. This was ultimately true, even for transistor devices.
Solid state devices, being able to combine all of these thing onto a chip solved the problem.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
their computor has no speall chekor.
What kind of wimpy slide rule do you have? Mine is in a holster that hangs on my belt! Now that impresses that ladies!
Best Slashdot Co
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.
IBM has come out with a machine that can do the work of 20 office clerks. The only problem is it takes 50 technicians to operate it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Kinda makes you wonder where we'll be in another 50 years. They couldn't imagine a small computer, what is it that we can't imagine now?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
Excuse me?
If anything we are LACKING sufficient computing to
allow for efficient operation of our businesses.
I recently went to refinance my car ( at a bank that will remain nameless ). This bank held my original car loan. I spent an hour filling out
paperwork ( all of which had been filled out with
my original loan ), having the loan officer call my
insurance company to get my insurance information
( even though they had all of my insurance info on
file ), etc. All of this totally redundant. I had to come back the NEXT day because the guy
the loan officer calls to do credit checks and fax
them to him was busy.
All of this should have been accomplishable over the
web. There is NO reason that it had to be that
hard.
Oh yes, and then they proceeded to automagically
debit my old loan payment ( several days after
the old loan had been paid off in full by the new
loan ) because it takes about a week for the PAPER
to work it's way through channels.
It took almost six weeks for the bank to
restore order to my account ( I will not recount the full ins and outs of that, but it was bad ).
All of this was unecessary. If they had proper computer systems handling the back end of the bank I should have been able to go to the web page for my account arrange refinancing there in under 10 minutes.
Note that every one of the bank employees I dealt
with had a computer on their desk. What made this
experience so inefficient ( and frustrating ) was
not their lack of computers, but the lack of competent back end systems for them to access with those computers. That is were the efficiency comes.
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.
I've always wondered what tasks were performed by these predecessors to the modern computer. I assume that the catalog sales store was using them to keep track of inventory and/or sales.
Sometimes you can see these machines in 1960s spy or science fiction movies. Look for scenes where "the answer" to a question is delivered on a Hollerith card.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Where this article talks about "scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine", it isn't about scrapping the punch card keyboarding machines, but about using the cards as input instead of as the databases themselves. From the 1880 census until the 1950's large databases consisted of boxes (and sometimes cabinets or rooms) full of punch cards. To process the data, there were a number of specialized machines:
Keypunches: a keyboard that punched holes into cards. Good ones also typed the data along the top of the card so it was human-readable, and could copy part or all of a card. The ones I worked with could be programmed by typing control codes onto a card and wrapping it around a spool inside the machine -- this gave you tab stops and let you set it to automatically copy headers from each card to the next one, until you hit an escape key to let you change the headers...
Sorters & mergers: Sorting and grouping was accomplished by machines that would physically shuffle the cards into order. The operation was counter-intuitive; to alphabetize a 20 letter name field, you'd start by sorting into 26 bins on the _last_ (rightmost) letter, stack them up and sort on the next letter (which left cards differing only in the last letter in order), and repeat for 20 times through. Searches were done by setting the sorter to set aside cards matching the criteria and running the whole set through. And after doing a search or other operation that split the deck into two categories, it was nice to have a machine to merge the two decks back together into order without requiring a full-scale sort.
Tabulators: Would read the sorted, grouped, cards and add up the columns. Also could perform calculations on a card (like hoursworked * payrate = grosspay) and punch the answer into the card, or onto a new card. Tabulators generally did not type human-readable text on the cards, so...
Printers: One kind would read cards and type text along the top. Some of these were still in use in the 1980's, because mainframes still could output to card punches, and those punches did not type text... The other kind read cards and printed the report on paper.
When I started hanging out at the college computer center (1971), the databases were kept on removable hard disk packs, and punch cards were mainly for data input. However, even though they'd keep 3 copies of each database on different disks, the reliability was low enough that for really important stuff they'd also store the punch cards as a backup, or sometimes have the computer punch a backup into cards. The machine that printed on those cards was kept running, just in case. At least a half-dozen keypunches were in continuous use (and the card reader on the computer had to be overhauled once a week so it could continue reading all those cards). The tabulator was just gathering dust, but the sorter was used frequently -- batch database updates run faster if the input is in the same order as the disk file.
The idiosyncrasies of British currency...
Note. This was written before Decimalisation came along in 1971. before then, instead of the current system of 100 pence to the pound, we had Pounds Shillings and Pence commonly known as LSD (from the latin, Libra, Solidi, Denarii).
There were 12 pence to every shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound.
"Information wants to be paid"
Overall I think that the application of computers has lead to a remarkable increase in efficiency. But I think you have to keep your business processes simple to realize true efficiencies. Computers do not handle exceptions well, they do not make judgements well. If your business processes are riddled with judgement calls and exceptions you might want to think about replacing your back end system with the good old fashionned pen and paper (or spreadsheet these days).
I recently interviewed at a company that had 400 employees. They had an terribly complicated year end bonus structure. They spent millions of dollars and many man years automating the bonus calculation process. For 400 people. Think about that for a minute. You could hire temps to do the calculations for the next 50 years for what it cost to automate the process. To top it off the rules change every year, forcing a recode of the calculation engine.
But the root cause is needless complexity. Whether you do it with computers or will people complexity adds cost, with usually very little benefit. I have seen executive bonus systems that jump through torturous calculations that end up in a net difference of $50 compared to a simple flat percentage scheme. People just don't think about why they are making rules, and what the cost of those rules will be to the business.
But anyway, my point was, past a certain level of complexity you are better off doing it with people, instead of building fragile and intracate rule based automated systems in an attempt to handle every eventuality.
-josh
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 . . . !!!
For a wealth of information on the computer mentioned in the article, the LEO, see:
www.leo-computers.org.uk [i.hate.square.brackets] [probably.already.slashdotted.to.hell]
What you have to realise is at the time, my Dad and other people working on the LEOs genuinely believed that these were the world's first computers ever, not just the world's first business computers as they later became known.
You see, at the time, all the World War Two computer developments were covered under the millitary Official Secrets Act.
When these secrets broke to the general public in the 1970s, needless to say my Dad was somewhat dissapointed to discover he was not a great computing pioneer after all!
My Dad fondly recalls being able to boil a kettle and fry bacon & eggs on these monsters.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
This is all documented in the book "the Chip" by T. R. Reid, which I literally have on my desk as I write this. It is briefly summarized here:
In other words, it wasn't just solid state as in a single transistor, but solid state, as in entire cirsuits, the integrated IC that was the solution.The problem was that transistors still had to be interconnected to form electronic circuits, and hand-soldering thousands of components to thousands of bits of wire was expensive and time-consuming. It was also unreliable; every soldered joint was a potential source of trouble. The challenge was to find cost-effective, reliable ways of producing these components and interconnecting them.
The Tyranny of Numbers was quite real, and occupied minds for most of the 50s. The solution of this basic and fundamental problem made possible the computer age. They are probably as important as the binary logic that runs on them.
You can also read more about this on the Texas Instrument Website.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Lyons must have had remarkably forward thinking management to go to all that trouble. Design and build their own 'computor' and basically invent business computing from the ground up.
Some achievement for a bakery and chain of tea shops!
"Information wants to be paid"
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
The computer is the favorite "busy toy" of someone who doesn't really want to work at work. That, combined with the efficiency gains, has lead to a lot of people doing a lot of nothing aside from maintaining the appearance that they shouldn't be fired. The pointless meanings, aimless memos, unnecessary and ineffective initiatives, etc. Thus the gains of computers are deliberately concealed.
The second of the problem is computers being untrusted and used as a parallel system. There is no such thing as a paperless office. Paper records are kept parallel to computer records, sometimes requiring all of the old work, and all of the computer work. This is more often an apparent problem than a real one, as it moves a smaller amount of administrative work to an earlier time. While it's less efficient than it could be, it's better than not using computers.
The third part, aside from being a problem in itself, is half a cause and half an effect of the second; they grew up intertwined. As home computer systems were adapted to office use, and the first generation of programmers raised with computers from a young age appeared, reliability was sacrificed in favor of attractiveness, apparent ease of learning, and flashy feature checklists. Software is replaced every few years, and old data is lost or damaged. Many users stopped considering computers infallable and started considering them unreliable, dramatically limiting their use.
This last one is indisputably a real, serious problem in software design. Software is rushed to market, then thrown away just as the bugs are worked out. But this is more directly a problem of poor software purchasing; the market demands features, useful or not, and the software industry can only comply to that demand, or be unprofitable and unappreciated.
Having experianced full factory downtimes where I work, I can say they are very expensive. However, the level of automation used is a vast improvement over ANYTHING manual. To properly manufacture a part, over 500 individual steps must be performed. Data collection is automated and used in stastical process control. This means that at measurement steps, if the range is trending large, then the tool needs service before any manufactured parts are out of tolerance causing expensive scrapped parts. If measurements trend low or high, a tool adjustment may be needed instead of tool downtime. Data is associated with each tool and each product. With this data we even were able to find our tools in one case were fine, but a batch of raw material was not. In high volume manufacturing, the slide rule people simply could not keep up. There are too many variables. Automation also keeps track of each part so nothing gets double processed or miss a step. The tool will not start a wrong part because the lotfile will be at the wrong step and therefore will not provide the parameters to the tool to process it. This alone prevents millions in losses from human mistakes. Grabbing the wrong part and starting it no longer happenes. It's lot tag barcode is read as part of the start process. No match = no go. There is nothing in the dead tree media that uses a person with this accuracy. I have made the mistake beofore of missreading I's L's 1's O's 0's Q's etc. The barcode is never fooled.
The truth shall set you free!
The operation was counter-intuitive; to alphabetize a 20 letter name field, you'd start by sorting into 26 bins on the _last_ (rightmost) letter, stack them up and sort on the next letter (which left cards differing only in the last letter in order), and repeat for 20 times through.
This is the radix sort, which all hackers should learn while teething. When you apply certain rules that ensure that only columns that might be significant are compared, it is an extremely efficient sorting algorithm.
Worst-case, the complexity is O(l n), where l is the length of the longest string and n is the number of strings. With completely random data, l is effectively log n, so overall it goes to O(n log n). The extra rules substantially reduce the effect of lack of randomness in strings, so it's likely that the algorithm will almost always run in O(n log n)
Compare to a merge sort, which is O(n log n) worst-case, the best you can get, but that assumes that the comparison step is constant. With a string, worst-case comparison is O(l), resulting in overall performance of O(l n log n) or, with random data, O(n log^2 n). QuickSort is even worse, with a worst-case performance of O(n^2 log n), though still an average performance like the merge sort. (Too bad I can't use superscript on this board.)