COMPUTERIZATION
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end … and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4
749 Age Of Computers
We live in the day of computers. According to Dr. Carl Hammer, director of computer sciences for the Univac Division of Sperry Rand Corporation, computers already do 99% of the clerical work in America.
There are not enough people in the entire world to handle the work of the computers already operating in the US.
In 1976 alone, about $23 billion were expended to install, operate and repair the 120,000 computers in America. In the 1980’s computer business could be the largest single industry in the world, and dominated by American companies.
750 The Microprocessors
The big breakthrough in computer manufacturing came with the semiconductors. These are tiny electronic devices that can be equipped with memories to form miniature computers called microprocessors. Each year, the number of tiny wires and switches that can be made to fit on a single chip of silicon had been doubled.
A single microprocessor, half the size of a stick of gum, can have enough components to provide as much calculating effects as the room-sized computer of a decade ago. According to scientists, the Univac I computer built twenty years ago, and filling up four rooms, could fit loosely—output-wise—into one little chip of silicon.
Thus, the computer is getting cheaper and easier to use—and proliferating.
751 Most Powerful Computer
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s most powerful computer is the Control Data Corporation’s CDC 7600. It can perform 36 million operations in one second and has an access time of 27.5 nano-second. The cost? $15 million.
752 Computerizing The Scriptures
Homer Duncan discusses a computer which can assimilate into permanent storage 5 million words per second. Since the Bible has 850 thousand words, this memory is capable of assimilating the entire Bible six times in one second and bringing it out again, word by word, any passage, any verse, any place, on command, in 200-billionth of a second. No errors are allowed. Running at that rate, the unit has to pass a test in which it runs 24 hours without a single error.
753 Home Computers
There are an estimated 5,000 home computers in America, but in three years, that figure will soar to an estimated 500,000 sets. The latest fad among electronics buffs is to build their own home computers.
The social implications of the home computer are enormous. The future will see a linkup of home computers with large outside data bases and with other home computers.
For that to happen, communications networks, such as cable television, telephone systems and satellites, will have to be expanded to provide inexpensive and readily accessible links between computer users.
If that can be accomplished, people will have at their finger tips access to financial reports, educational materials and whole libraries maintained in computer storage. Mail volume will be cut drastically because people will be able to communicate almost instantly by computer. The cost of a home system, available within the next decade on a wide scale would be less than $1,000 in today’s prices, plus utility fees for the communications hookup.
754 1,000,000 Years Or 84 Minutes
Remember the Apollo 13 mission was nearly aborted because the ship became crippled in space? A computer spent 84 minutes discovering and correcting the problem. Whereas a man with pencil and paper would have needed 1,000,000 years to solve the difficulty.
The on-board computer of every U.S. ICBM are programmed to make up to 800,000 mathematical calculations in the first nine minutes to flight.
755 Check At One-Second Intervals
The Ben Ocean Lancer, the first “dynamically positioned” oil-and-gas drilling ship built in Britain was launched on Scotland’s River Clyde. The vessel could drill in a fixed position without being anchored in the conventional manner. Dynamic positioning is the computer-controlled process which involves auto matic checking of the ship’s position at one-second intervals and adjusting it by making minute corrections in the propeller pitch settings.
756 Computer-Controlled Traffic
From the nation’s capital comes this report:
The computer has now been handed the problem of traffic control in downtown Washington, D.C.
The experiment covers half a square mile near the White House. Electronic sensors, embedded in the streets monitor the flow of vehicles above. Telephone wires carry the information to a central computer that is programmed to analyze these data immediately, and to send back the appropriate commands to street lights.
Some 450 Washington buses are equipped with radio transmitters that will link them to the central computer. Thus, if the driver wants to set up a series of green lights for himself, he can press a button requesting the computer to give him those signals at cross streets. If the computer decides that the request is justified, it will send commands to the appropriate street lights. If the computer thinks otherwise, it will ignore the request.
757 The Longest Root
Since ancient times, mathematicians have been fascinated by the problem of determining the square root of 2—that number which, when multiplied by itself, will equal 2. As early as 1750 B.C., the Babylonians computed a value that was accurate to five decimal places (1.41421). By 1967, researchers in England, working with a computer, had stretched the answer to 100,000 digits.
Now a Columbia University mathematician has surpassed even that prodigious effort. In what may well be the lengthiest computation of a mathematical constant of all time, Jacques Dutka has calculated the square root of 2 to more than one million places.
Starting with a rough approximation of the root derived from the mathematically well-known Pell Equation, Dutka devised a special logarithm (mathematical procedure) that enabled a computer to refine that answer to an extraordinary degree.
After 47½ hours of computer time and billions upon billions of individual calculations, the electronic brain ticked off an answer that was correct to at least 1,000,082 digits. It is printed in 200 pages of lightly spaced computer print-out, each containing 5,000 digits. The square root of 2 is what mathematicians call an irra tional number, one that runs maddeningly on without any repetitive patterns or predictable sequence no matter how far it is carried out.
Delighted by his success, Dutka is now eyeing more ambitious projects; calculating million-digit values for π (3.14159 … ); the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; and the mathematical constant (2.71828 … ), the base of natural logarithms and one of the most significant numbers in higher mathematics. Says Dutka: “After that, I can well afford to call it quits.”
—Time
758 Wonders Of Man
The work that the computer can accomplish in minutes astounds us. Yet it has been found that in order to match just one human brain, a computer would have to be as large as the Empire State Building!
759 Human Computer
Perhaps the strangest human computer is Charles Grandemange of France. He was born in 1835—a one-pound baby. But he was endowed with a prodigious brain. At age 14, he toured Europe in demonstration of his calculating ability. He lived in a wooden box only one foot wide, but he could multiply two 100-digit numbers by one another within thirty seconds. He could divide a 23-digit figure by another and find the remainder at one glance. He was billed as the most lightning of all lightning calculators.
—Adopted from Ripley
760 “I am God”
A favorite story of research scientists is about a future president of the United States who assembled his scientific brain trust and asked them to build the biggest and smartest computer the world has ever known. “When it’s finished,” he said, “I want to ask it the most important question ever asked.”
When the giant electronic brain was completed, the president came before it and asked, “Is there a God?”
Lights flashed, wheels whirled, chemicals bubbled, and then came the answer: “There is now.”
—James C. Hefley
761 Meaning Of Gigo
You are anxious to know what “GIGO” means. It is an abbreviation for “GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT.” It is technical slang for the mistakes made by modern computers. If a computer turns out misleading information, the operators say, “GIGO”—”Someone fed garbage into the machine, so the machine feeds back garbage.”
WHEN COMPUTERS ACT UP
762 Monumental Mistakes
It would take one hundred clerks working for one hundred years to make a mistake as monumental as a single computer can make in one one-thousandth of a second. This insight is one we usually overlook. We usually think of all the labor-saving of which computers are capable, but if we ever got in trouble with a company that bills through computers, we would soon learn that it can be extremely difficult to get someone to reverse the mistake. For every rose there is a thorn, and for this great promise for progress there is also the promise of blunders and mistakes that are astronomical.
—Ray O. Jones
763 $755 Million Dollar Debt
A young man in Casper, Wyoming, was looking for an income tax refund of $511 on his $8,000 salary. He probably would have settled for $500 or even $450. But he was totally unprepared for a notice from the government asking him to pay his overdue taxes within 10 days. The IRS claimed that he owed $755,935, 575. Obviously it was a mistake. But for a few moments the man was floored!
—Our Daily Bread
764 She Can’t Get Rid Of Check
How do you get rid of a Veterans Administration check not yours?
Cany Postlethwaite has never been in the military, but a misdirected check from the Veterans Administration has made its way to her doorstep for a seventh time and she can’t seem to get rid of it.
She received a VA check in the mail made out to one Ronald Lee Vest. She put it back outside for the postman to pick up on his next round. “I got it back about four or five days later, in a different envelope,” she said. So she telephoned the VA office here and was directed to send the stray check there. “So I did—and I received it back again, in the same envelope.”
Next she mailed it to the Treasury Department office in Kansas City where the check was issued, along with a certified letter advising that “I did not know this person and this person did not live here.” The check was returned once more, in a different envelope.
“Then I took it down to the White Rock (postal) station and gave it to the postmaster,” she recounted. “And I got it back again. Then I took it down personally to the Veterans Administration, again—and I got it back, again.
“This was last week, and they told me to mail it to (state) VA headquarters in Waco. And this morning I received it back again.”
After the seventh delivery, Mrs. Postlethwaite phoned the Dallas VA people once more. “They just said, ’Well, I don’t know what else we can do, ’ she said.
At one point she called the secret service and told one of its agents she intended to destroy the check.
The agent told her: “You can’t destroy it. That’s government property.” All right, she’d keep it, she told the man. And he replied, “You can’t keep it. It’s not yours.”
Mrs. Postlethwaite is waiting for further instruction.
—Associated Press
765 Computer Error In Israel
Another news report: William Seitoun won his war against red tape after he threatened to blow up himself and his 10-year-old son unless the Israel Veterans Administration paid more money for his disability claim.
Zeitoun, 36, and a war invalid since 1959, parked in front of Tel Aviv’s Veterans Administration building with his son and screamed, “I’ll give you seven hours to pay me my money or I’m blowing up the car.”
He held a cigarette lighter to six cannisters of gasoline inside the car to keep away police and spectators. Some pleaded with him to release his son, but the boy shouted, “I’m staying with papa.”
Zeitoun set up a placard, reading, “I was disabled in the army and the government doesn’t give me enough to live.”
Veterans officials checked Zeitoun’s file and discovered what they called “a computer mistake” that chopped his monthly pension of 2,100 Israeli pounds—about 525 dollars—to 1,500 Israeli pounds—375 dollars.
766 Smart?
A Dutch professor once fed this question into a very sophisticated computer. “I have the choice between 2 watches; one is broken and irrevocably stopped, the other loses one second every 24 hours. Which one should I buy?”
The computer’s reply: “The one that is stopped, as it indicates the correct time twice every 24 hours; the other does only once every 120 years.”
767 Solving It’s Own Problem
The Vice President of one of our local banks objected to investing in a data-processing machine, considering it a needless expense. The board of directors outvoted him, however, and plans for installation began. When delivery day came, it was discovered that the components were far too large to fit into the bank’s elevator.
“How am I going to get this thing up to the third floor?” the delivery man moaned.
The vice President saw no problem. “Plug it in,” he said, “and let it figure it out for itself.”
—R. M. Cordell
768 Epigram On Computerization
• One unemployed man to another: “What hurts was that I wasn’t replaced by a whole computer—just a transistor.”
• The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems—and they never come out again.
See also: Automation ; Technology.