well he expected uh at least the moon and perhaps the Sun from his salesman he wanted a a good sales job and he wanted a lot of orders because we grew with orders and he also used to say look the salesman who is the man who makes things happen in the United States nothing happens until something is sold then it's manufactured it's delivered it's used but nothing happens so the salesman in his mind was a sort of an American hero and perhaps very high on the list of American Heroes it was these Heroes of IBM
Who convinced hundreds of ordinary businessmen to buy IBM's 650 computer orders started pouring in within a year IBM had sold almost a thousand of them and soared past Remington rand's univac to become the largest computer company in the world IBM's sudden new dominance threatened the fledgling British industry too in the early ' 50s a handful of Manufacturers from fanti to Lions fought over what few customers there were at this business efficiency exhibition the British tabulator company Britain's equivalent of IBM was showing its Wares the firm's one and only computer salesman tried to attract attention by
programming it to play NS and Crossing later all the major British companies would merge to take on IBM we can't expect to be able to outproduce uh a large American company but there's no reason why we can't outthink them and a great deal of thought was needed back in the ' 50s if manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic were to honor the promise of their advertisements computers the advertising claimed were the key to the Future but in their enthusiasm they failed to mention one thing in the late 1950s the computer manufacturers advertisements and proposals
were Rosy and we who were making those promises turned out to be Liars we didn't know we were but we were the problem was software software development writing software the programs that tell the computer what to do turned out to cost two three even four times the price of the machine itself in fact this problem of software development grew so severe that it really threatened the further growth of the computer industry computers costing thousands of dollars a month would sit idle while programmers struggle to talk the computer's Arcane language we bpx to 10d a 10
well this AO gets us into a bsn1 don't we want a bsn1 12 instead unfortunately for programmers computers cannot execute programs written in English they require a special language of their own the computer only understands the language of binary and it's really a code not a language binary simply means zeros and ones analogous to an electric light switch which is either on or off if one simply looks at an example of what the binary code would have to be for 5 * 7 + 3 one can see that it's incredibly difficult to write that kind
of thing accurately in the first place it's tedious to write it and in the second place it's almost impossible to do it correctly programmers developed alphabetic codes which were easier than binary but still programming was difficult and tedious and few people were attracted to it the shortage of programmers could in the worst case have caused the growth of the computer industry to come to a dead halt because there were so few programmers without programmers you don't have programs that is to say software and without software the computer is useless you might just as well have
an automobile without a driver it doesn't go anywhere it just sits there this crisis could only be solved by making programming easier to do if people couldn't talk to computers in binary perhaps computers could be made to understand a language a bit closer to normal English the first so-called highlevel language that became significantly used was for Tran scientists and mathematicians found it relatively easy because it allowed them to write equations in the way they were used to businessmen who didn't often write equations didn't find Fortran much help they needed their own language one that could
handle letters as well as numbers and could process files of data for that you needed a different kind of language and that led to the development of cobal which stands for common business-oriented language cobal was very English oriented that is to say you wrote the programs in a language which was certainly not identical to English but at least looked like English when you read it and wrote it cobal was a revelation easy to use and to find errors and with the help of another piece of software called a compiler the high LEL program is automatically
translated back to the binary code that the computer understands with the programming problem solved at least in principle the stage was set for an endless variety of new uses for computers in all walks of life operating around the clock this Communication Center receives and processes all incoming requests for Police Service computers could now track police cars or pedigree B fools in Kansas City Missouri the American Herford Association dedicated a new electronic computer on hand to push the starting switch America's Grand Champion Herford bull HR silver image 70 this hoof switch started a new IBM 1401
computer that will keep track of all registered herds silver image thus became the first animal ever to trace his own ancestry and appeared quite interested in the results but most computers were found in administrative offices where armies of Clarks were beginning to disappear replaced by a single computer computers also started showing up in factories controlling machines and processes that once required hundreds of human hands as computers intruded more and more into the workplace fears were raised that increased automation might make millions of workers obsolete automation is a young new word heavy with promise and with
problems as a matter of fact several people have suggested to us that it's a little too heavy for a Sunday afternoon in Dune could be we shall see and it's true that this plant will cause a layoff of some of our loyal workers however it's a necessity to do it to be competitive in today's industry I thought you'd never get back do you know what even Hollywood took up the he's up on the roof feeding the pigeons no do you know what he's doing here what he's trying to replace us all with mechanical brain he's
under special assignment to aai to see if Emir can be adapted to this department that means the end of us all Peg Peg calm down no machine can do our job that's what they said in payroll movies like desk set revealed the conflicting emotions computers stirred up in society while many people viewed them with fear and disdain others thought they represented progress the future a relief from tedious tasks good girl not surprisingly the staunchest advocates for computers were the computer manufacturers like IBM's Tom Watson Jr a lot of people call these machines giant brains and
whenever I he hear the term it makes me shudder because they are giant giant tools they're certainly not giant brains and if you have good tools you're upgrading man not downgrading him that was a common argument that computers replace based jobs nobody wanted certainly it was true at the Bank of America which employed almost 2,500 bookkeepers just to process personal checking accounts every day they sorted and recorded more than 9 million checks the perfect job for a computer this is Los Angeles and I'm Ronald Reagan in 1961 in one of his lesser roles Ronald Reagan
was the commercial spokesman for General electric who made the bank's computer the Bank of America has called this new system electronic recording method of accounting or by the more familiar and friendlier term FMA a competent experienced bookkeeper using conventional mechanical equipment is expected to do the sorting and posting for about 250 accounts an hour Irma can sort and post 550 accounts a minute
