traffic; the automatic ground-controlled-approach system that lands
planes in bad weather without human help is one, the mighty SAGE defense
system is another. SAGE may one day take over commercial air traffic: in
the meantime, the Federal Aviation Agency relies heavily on smaller
computers in locations all over the country.
Originally, general-purpose business computers were put to work
processing the vast quantities of data needed to keep traffic flowing
along the airways. New, special designs, including those of the
Librascope Division of General Precision, Inc., are being added as they
become available. Remington Rand UNIVAC is also working on the problem,
and UNIVAC equipment has been tested on Strategic Air Command
round-robin flights. It has posted as many as eighty in-flight Axes for
one mission, a feat that the unaided human controller can only gasp at.
Obviously, control of aircraft cannot be turned over pell-mell from
human to computer. The FAA is proceeding cautiously, and a recent report
from an industry fact-finding board recommended a “Project Beacon”
approach which will continue to rely heavily on radar plus human
controllers. But when the problems of communication between man and
machine are worked out, no human being can keep track of so many
aircraft so accurately, or compute alterations in course to prevent
collision and ensure an optimum use of air space as can the computer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_On the Sea_
The Navy uses computers too. At the David Taylor Test Basin in Maryland,
a UNIVAC LARC is busy doing design work on ship hulls. Other computers
mounted in completed Navy vessels perform navigation and gun-ranging
functions. At New London, Connecticut, a Minneapolis-Honeywell computer
simulates full scale naval battles. Radar and sonar screens in mock
submarine command posts show the maneuvering of many ships in realistic
simulations. Polaris submarines depend on special computers to launch
their missiles, and the missiles themselves mount tiny computers that
navigate Polaris to its target. Another computer task was the “sea
testing” of the nuclear submarine “Sea Wolf” before it was launched!
[Illustration:
Photo courtesy of _Litton Systems, Inc._
Airborne computer-indicator system in Hawkeye naval aircraft. This
equipment performs task of surveillance, tracking, command and
control.
]
Computers are being used by the Navy in a project that has tremendous
applications not only for military application but for civilian use as
well. Mark Twain to the contrary, a lot of people have tried to do
something about the weather, among them an Englishman named Richardson.
Back in 1922 he came up with the idea of predicting the weather for a
good-sized chunk of England. Basically his ambitious scheme was sound.
Drawing on weather stations for the data, he determined to produce a
24-hour forecast.
Unfortunately for Mr. Richardson, the English, and the world in general,
the mathematics required was so complicated that he labored for three
months on that first prediction. By then it had lost much of its
value—and it was also wrong! The only solution that Richardson could
think of was to enlist the aid of about 60,000 helpers who would be
packed into a huge stadium. Each of these people would be given data
upon which to perform some mathematical operation, and then pass on to
the next person in line. Pages would transfer results from one section
of the stadium to another, and a “conductor,” armed with a megaphone
undoubtedly along with his baton, would “direct” the weather symphony,
or perhaps cacaphony. As he lifted his baton, the helpers were to
calculate like crazy, when he lowered it they would pass the result
along. What Richardson had invented, of course, was the first
large-scale computer, a serial computer with human components. For a
number of reasons, this colossal machine was never completed. It was
obviously much easier to simply damn the weatherman.
Actually, Richardson had stumbled onto something big. He had brought
into being the idea of “numerical weather prediction.” It is known that
weather is caused by the movement of air and variations in its pressure.
Basically it is simple, knowing pressure conditions yesterday and today,
to project a line or extrapolate the conditions for tomorrow. If we know
the conditions tomorrow, we can then predict or forecast the
temperature, precipitation, and winds.
[Illustration:
_U.S. Navy_
Weather map prepared and printed out by computer gives data in
graphical form. Enlarged view of weather “picture” (above) shows how
it is formed by printed digits representing the pressure at
reporting stations.
]
There was even the mathematics to make this possible in Richardson’s
day: the so-called “primitive equations” of the pioneer mathematician
Euler. These are six partial differential equations involving velocity,
pressure, density, temperature, and so on. But though the principle is
simple, the practical application is hopelessly involved—unless you have
a stadium filled with 60,000 willing mathematicians or a fast computer
of some other type.
In 1950 the stage was finally set for the implementation of numerical
weather prediction. First, electronic computers were available. Second,
and importantly, mathematician C. G. Rossby had worked some magic with
the original primitive equations and reduced them to a single neat
equation with only four terms. The new tool is called the Rossby
equation. Meteorologists and mathematicians at Princeton’s Institute for
Advanced Study decided to combine the Rossby equation, the MANIAC
computer, and some money available from the Office of Naval Research.
The result was JNWPU, Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, later to
become NANWEP, for Navy Numerical Weather Problems Group. It is too bad
that pioneer Richardson did not live to see the exploitation of his
dream.
What NANWEP does is to take the meteorological data from some 3,000
reporting stations, compare them with those existing yesterday, and
print out a weather map for the Northern Hemisphere for tomorrow.
Because there are so many more stations reporting than the handful that
Richardson used, the number of computations has risen to the
astronomical total of about 300,000,000. Despite this, a Control Data
Corporation 1604 digital computer does the job in a good bit less time
than the three months it took Richardson. NANWEP prints out its weather
maps 40 minutes from the time all data are in.
Teletype reports come in from the thousands of weather stations; these
are punched on tape and fed to the 1604. Since the information includes
geographical position in addition to meteorological data, the computer
prints out numbers that form a map of weather coming up. Although the
meteorologist adds some clarifying lines by connecting points of equal
pressure, the “raw” map with its distinctive shaded areas is meaningful
even to the layman.
Further refinements are in the offing. As many as 10,000 weather
stations may eventually report to the central computer, which may also
learn to accept the teletype information directly with no need for the
intermediate step of punching a tape. Although it will be a long time
before a positive forecast, exact in every detail, is possible, NANWEP
already has lifted weather prediction from the educated guesswork of the
older meteorologists to truly scientific forecasting.
It turns out that numerical weather prediction brings with it some
bonuses. NANWEP can predict the action of ocean waves three days in
advance, in addition to its regular wind, temperature, and precipitation
information. So it is now being put to work preparing optimum routes for
ships. Here’s the way it would work. A ship sailing from California to
Japan requests the best routes for the voyage. Initially the computer is
given the ship’s characteristics and told how it will perform in various
sea conditions. It then integrates this information with the predicted
sea conditions for the first day’s leg, and plots several different
courses. Distances the ship would travel on each of these courses are
plotted, and a curve is drawn to connect them. Now the computer repeats
the process for the next day, so that each of the tentative courses
branches out with its own alternates. The process is repeated for each
of the five days of the voyage. Then the computer works backward,
picking the best route for the entire voyage, and gives the course to be
followed for optimum time. If that isn’t sufficiently informative for
the captain, he can request and receive not one but three courses: one
for the fastest trip regardless of sea condition, another for the
fastest trip with waves of only a certain height, and finally a course
for the fastest trip through calm water! The advantages of such a
service are immediately obvious and give a hint at many other
applications of the technique to air travel, truck transport, and so on.
NANWEP is ground-based, of course. There are also airborne weather
computers like those of the U.S. Weather Bureau’s National Severe Storm
Research Aircraft Project. The Weather Bureau has jumped its computer
budget from $1.5 to $2.5 million to extend this and other projects. The
compact airborne computers ride along in DC-6 and B-57 aircraft to
monitor hurricanes off Florida and tornadoes in the Great Plains area.
The computers gather forty different kinds of information and convert it
to digital form at thousands of characters a second. Such monitoring of
violent weather by means of computers suggests an intriguing use of the
machine. Man has long considered the prospect of going the step beyond
weather recording and prediction to actually changing or even creating
his own weather. He has done a few rather startling things of this kind,
admittedly on a small scale but with tremendous implications.
Cloud-seeding experiments are samples, as attempts both to induce
precipitation and to create or destroy storms. These experiments, though
inconclusive, have led to results—including precipitation of lawsuits
and ill feeling. Meteorologists attempted to divert a hurricane along
the Atlantic coast line once, apparently with results. But the storm
swerved too far and the weathermen incurred the justifiable wrath of
those living in the area affected. Why not simulate such an experiment
in the computer? Besides being safer, it is also far cheaper. In the
long run, we may do something about the weather at that.
_Computers in Space_
There are many points in history when seemingly fortuitous happenings
take place. The invention of the printing press appears to have occurred
at a fork in the road as literature flowered. The discovery of gasoline
and the automobile went hand in hand. So it is with the electronic
computer and the spacecraft. Is the computer here because it was needed
for such an application, or did it actually cause the advent of space
flight? Our conclusions must depend on our belief or disbelief in such
things as causality. A realistic view might be merely to applaud and
appreciate the confluence of two important streams of thought to make a
river that will one day flow to the other planets and finally out of the
solar system entirely.
Putting even something so unsophisticated as a brick into orbit would
require the plotting of an exact trajectory handily done only by a
computer. Sending the Mercury capsule aloft obviously requires a more
refined aiming system, and its re-entry into the atmosphere demands a
nicety of calculation measured in a fraction of a degree. The same is
true for the Russian achievements in sending a space vehicle around the
moon, and manned capsules in prolonged orbit. Such navigation can be
planned and carried out only by the sophisticated mathematics of a
computer. Dr. Wernher von Braun has said that any effective
space-vehicle firing program would be impossible without computers and
computing techniques.
Not long ago, the mariner could leisurely brace himself on the deck of
his vessel and take a noon sight with his sextant. It mattered little if
it took him some time to work out the computations; his ship traveled at
only a few knots and in only two dimensions. Today the space capsule or
missile moves as far in a single minute as a ship might in an entire
day, and it moves not across the practically flat surface of the sea but
through three-dimensional space in which that third degree of freedom is
of vital importance. Not only must the navigation be done with fantastic
precision, it must be done in “real time” to be of any value. This is
true whether the mathematics is being done by a Mercury capsule or one
of our antimissile missiles. Just as Richardson’s weather prediction
three months after the fact was of little use, the trajectory of an
invading missile will avail us nothing if it takes us thirty minutes to
compute. The problem by then, for the survivors, will be one of fallout
and not blast.
For this reason a computer is aboard practically every space vehicle
that leaves the earth. The Atlas and Titan, the Minuteman and Polaris,
all are controlled by tiny digital computers in their innards,
supplemented by more complex machines on the ground. These ground
computers calculate the trajectory, then monitor the missile to correct
its course if necessary. Complex as these functions seem, they are
childishly simple by comparison with the kind of calculations that are
necessary for lunar or planetary flight.
A mathematician who knew his astronomy could work out the figures
necessary to launch a space craft on its flight to Venus, but he would
have to start some time before launching day. In fact, it would take
forty generations of mathematicians to do the job. The trip itself would
consume about four months. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratories of the
California Institute of Technology, this 800-year project is planned and
flown in thirty seconds by an IBM 7090 computer. For example, the
computer tells us that if we had blasted off bright and early on August
17, 1962, we could make it to the Clouded Planet at 10:09 A.M., December
9. The curved trip through space would cover 32,687,000 miles.
The computer, then, not only can perform in real time but can even
shrink time. The Venus trip is simulated daily at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratories, and tapes stored in the computer cabinets also bear the
names Moon, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. When the day comes to make
the actual voyage, the odds are good that because of what scientists
have learned from the computer the trip will go as smoothly as all the
simulations. Rather than the planetary voyages, which are still some
time off, lunar soft landings will be among the first to demonstrate the
accuracy of simulations now being made by General Dynamics, whose
Atlas-Centaur will put the lunar rover Surveyor on the moon shortly.
Apollo, the three-man lunar spaceship, won’t be far behind.
Not long ago a computer was put to work to see if it could pare down the
costs of the Atlas and Thor rocket engines. We have to have such
defensive weapons, but the cheaper we can make them the more we can
afford. The economy program worked, reducing costs more than a third.
_Summary_
The computer is on the Washington payroll to stay, and it may well move
up the hierarchical ladder there. It was not a comedian but an M.I.T.
professor who recently suggested that the computer will replace the
bureaucrat. Contending that the computer is inherently more flexible
than the bureaucrat, Professor John McCarthy told an Institute of Radio
Engineers meeting that the machines will not regiment us. “On the
contrary, I think we can expect a great deal more politeness from
machines than we have gotten from humans,” he said. His views were
debated by other panelists, but the gauntlet seems to have been flung.
With a party affiliation, the computer may well run for president
someday!
[Illustration:
Lichty, © _Field Enterprises, Inc._
“It IS human, men!... Besides solving our problems of global strategy,
it’s also beginning to jot down its memoirs!”
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“_Business may not be the noblest pursuit, but it is true that men are
bringing to it some of the qualities which actuate the explorer,
scientist, artist: the zest, the open-mindedness, even the
disinterestedness, with which the scientific investigator explores some
field of research._”
—Earnest Elmo Calkins
8: The Computer in Business and Industry
The government, of course, is not the only user of the electronic
computer. Business is faced with the same problems as government, plus
others perhaps, and can use the same techniques in planning, producing,
merchandising, and keeping track of its products. To General Electric
goes the distinction of first installing the large-scale electronic
computer for its business-data processing. This was done quite recently,
in 1954. Commenting on the milestone, the _Harvard Business Review_ said
in part:
The revolution starts this summer at General Electric Company’s new
Appliance Park near Louisville, Kentucky. The management planning behind
the acquisition of the first UNIVAC to be used in business may
eventually be recorded by historians as the foundation of the second
industrial revolution; just as Jacquard’s automatic loom in 1801 or
Frederick W. Taylor’s studies of the principles of scientific management
a hundred years later marked turning points in business history.
It is early yet for comment from historians, but the growth of the
business computers from the pioneer UNIVAC bears out the theme of the
_Harvard Business Review_ suggestion. In 1961 there were 6,000 large
electronic computers in use; General Electric alone has more than 100.
One big reason for this is the fact that government is not alone in its
output of paperwork. It has been estimated that one-sixth of our Gross
National Product, or about $85 billion, is devoted to paper-handling. In
the time it takes to read this chapter, for example, Americans are
writing 4 million checks, and this is only a small part of the paperwork
involved in the banking business.
[Illustration:
_General Electric Co., Computer Dept._
First National Bank of Arizona personnel operate sorters during
initial operation of a new GE-210 computer-controlled
data-processing system. The sorters process bank checks at the rate
of 750 per minute as printer (foreground) prints bank statements at
900 lines per minute.
]
Wholesale banks have been called fiscal intelligence agencies, doing
business by the truckload, and measuring the morning mail by the ton.
Yet this information is dealt with not only in volume, but in precise
and accurate detail. If a client asks about the rating of a customer who
has just ordered several million dollars worth of goods, the bank may be
called on to furnish this information in a very short time, even though
the customer resides halfway around the world.
Since they deal in figures, it is logical that banks were among the
first businesses to be computerized. Many of us are aware of those
stylized numbers now on the bottom of most of our checks, and vaguely
conscious that through some mysterious juggling by computers called ERMA
and other such names banks balance our accounts at electronic speed.
Insurance companies were next in line as computer candidates. Like
banking, insurance is believed to have been available to Babylonian
merchants thousands of years ago. In those days there were fewer people,
and probably claims were fewer; the abacus was the only computer needed
to keep pace. But since insurance was introduced on the North American
continent, coincidentally in the same state, Pennsylvania, as banking,
it has been threatened with drowning in a sea of its own policies.
The computer is ideally suited for doing the work of the insurance
business. There is no question today that the computer has taken over
from the insurance clerk. One firm installed computers in 1953 and since
then has doubled its accounts and tripled dollar volume, without hiring
the 250 additional people who normally would have been required for such
an increase. Eight outlying offices have been closed, yet service is
better and faster, agents’ commissions are paid twice a month instead of
only once, and actuarial computations that once took six months are now
done in a week.
A computerized world is of course not without its problems. The computer
system is so efficient, in fact, that the same outcry is going up from
labor as was heard in the days of the first industrial revolution. It
has been said with some truth that automation upgrades jobs, and not the
workers themselves. The change-over from quill pen to pushbutton console
will take some time and cause some pain, but in the end our gain will be
as great a stride as we have made since the days of the introduction of
the first factories with their more efficient production methods. Surely
the business worker already has been freed from the tedium of adding
columns of figures and much filing, and given pleasanter work in
exchange.
_The Shopper’s Friend_
After banking and insurance, which businesses yield to the lure of
high-speed automatic data-processing? Department stores are dabbling,
and supermarkets too are beginning to use the computer. The A & P stores
are studying such a system, as is the Liggett Drug Company. At first the
computer looked attractive as an inventory and ordering tool; now it is
headed in the direction of automating the actual shopping operation.
In Paris, a retail grocer made merchandising history by displaying more
than 3,000 different items in a floor space of only 230 square feet. The
trick is in a punched-card system that automatically registers and
prices any item the buyer selects. At the check stand the card is run
through a computer which figures the bill and orders the groceries,
which are automatically selected from the warehouse and delivered in a
cart to the purchaser at the door!
A similar automatic supermart system is being pushed by Solartron—John
Brown, Ltd., in England. The computerized scheme works much like the
French one. The shopper inserts a card in the slot beside the item she
wants and a punch marks it in alpha-numeric code for item and price. If
more than one item is desired the card is reinserted. With each punch,
the machine slices off a bit of the edge of the card so that it slides
deeper into the slot next time. At the cashier’s station, the card is
placed in a computer. Fifteen seconds after she has paid for them, the
shopper is delivered her groceries. Besides the saving in time for the
shopper, there is a saving for the grocer in floor space and also the
elimination of the loss through shoplifting. About the only thing that
might seem to be against the new system is the psychology of the large
display, which motivation researchers tell us stimulates volume buying.
With this factor in mind, an official of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc.,
has suggested retaining the large stocks on display, but coding them
with fluorescent paint of certain wavelengths to correspond to price.
The shopper fills her cart even as in the conventional store, but at the
mechanized checkstand an electronic eye on the computer scans and prices
the items while they are being automatically packaged. The doubting
Thomases say of this system that the packager will probably put the eggs
on the bottom, along with the tomatoes and ice cream!
The advertising journal _Commercial Art_ comments sadly on this accepted
fact of automation in the market place: