Next Came Automation

By the mid to late 1960's the usage of computer systems in automating business record keeping processes was well underway. Although the machines were still called computers, most people had forgotten about the role of the computer as a computer and thought about it as a data processing machine. At the time, the term of choice for what computers were doing was data processing. In fact, one of the premium professional organizations was called The Data Processing Management Association. And many corporate departments who were responsible for these activities had the term Data Processing figuring prominently in their name.

Over the two decades from the mid 1960's to the mid 1980's most corporate jobs changed substantially as work that had previously been done by people was picked up by the computer in automated data processing systems. And people, who had, themselves, been the data processing system were now users of the automated data processing system.

Early computer systems were often justified on the basis of the number of jobs they replaced in the cost benefit analysis. "If we automate this process, we can get rid of twenty clerical positions." would be a typical claim. Although, as I remember from the time, it is unclear that any jobs were every really lost.The notion of automation required that jobs be lost to justify it. However, the real reason why these systems were being built was that everybody else was building them. And if you didn't keep up you would surely fall behind.

We can make two observations about the relationship between computation and automation that will help us extend this model later. First, computation gave rise to automation although that extension is not at all obvious. One would not look at a computer systems and automatically see an automation system. Second, the increased usage of the computer for automation gave rise to a greater demand for computation. This is, the world demand for computers turn out to be far more than five because data processing dramatically increased the demand for computers.