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.

In the Beginning there was Computation

There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Thomas Watson the head of IBM at the time the computer was invented. As the story goes, when asked about the size of the world market for computers, he replied "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Although there is little evidence that he actually said this, the story has taken on the status of urban legend and is also revealing of our understanding of computers at the time.

The computer was not really invented in the 1940's, it was resurrected. Charles Babbage did the foundation work in the early 1800's attempting to develop a machine that could compute the roots of polynomials. That notion of a computational machine stuck in the very name of the device that we still, to this very day, call a computer. Early computers were not seen, as they would be later, as information processing machines. They were seen as computational machines. Hence the name and the misunderstanding of the market implied by the apocryphal quote. If the computer had remained a mega calculator there may very well have been a very limited market for it.

Fortunately, some of the engineers at IBM, at the time, had a little imagination and could see beyond the basic computational capabilities. I can imagine that this caused no end of internal conflict at IBM as their cash cow, at the time, was the Electronic Accounting Machine which processed information on paper cards. Suggesting that the computer be used for this purpose was not only a suggestion that they replace their entire business with a new mode of processing, but it also suggested that information be encoded, not on cards which you can see, but in bits of electricity that you cannot see. So, although this seems obvious in hindsight, it was quite a leap of imagination at the time.

By the late 1960's the use of computers in automating business record keeping systems was in full swing. In fact, computation was, at this point, a fairly minor use of computer power. The computer resources used, for example, to compute your pay check are minor compared to the processing necessary to get the information ready for the computation and producing the paycheck once the computation is completed. If the name of these machines was updated along with their function, they would have been called automaters rather than computers. But, that did not seem very important at the time. So the old name stuck.

The point that I would like to close this piece with is - the computational power of computers led to the use of computers for automation. And this theme of computer usage leading to greater usages will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.