Toward the Electronic Office (1981) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Office System Planning
Office System Planning
Pages 33-44
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 33... ...
Before I get into planning, there really are a couple of things I have to cover. I think we must understand the nature of the ottice, at least what I believe to be some of the driving forces in this whole electronic office approach, some of the general trends, some of the converging technologies.
|
From page 34... ...
If you will remember wnen you were young, at least I did it when I was a young IBM salesman and I used to go home to meet my future wife, I used to float checks between Baltimore ana Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because a float existed. You could cash a check and it took five days for your money to get out of the bank.
|
From page 35... ...
I spoke at the University of Texas Graduate School of Business about three months ago and learned, to my very pleasant surprise, that there was not one person out of the couple thousand people in that business school that did not have hands-on, in-depth training and understanding of a computer system; a computer system built by IBM, Datapoint or Sperry Rand. They had the whole bit.
|
From page 36... ...
Without any question, basing tasks on the computer and the good old programming systems capability, you have the ability to provide all of the things that Lick (Licklider) indicated: ease of use and change, the flexibility to handle variety or complexity, the ability to do some generic programming while allowing specialized function through work stations.
|
From page 37... ...
All of the main frames, although they obviously will continue to be there, to control massive files and all those things, have diminished in importance over the decade. The capability to provide the power of a system in a small minicomputer, microcomputer based product on the other hand has grown within a processor the size of a typewriter a quarter-of-a-million, a million bits of semi-conductor storage, megabites of mass storage can exist.
|
From page 38... ...
There are too many people in this whole office automation enterprise that have either come from the data processing side -- where most of the automation has occurred -- or from the word processing office administration side where some of the automation is occurring. Very few people have concerned themselves with the most common means of communicating and exchanging information, the whole telecommunications area and voice communication.
|
From page 39... ...
We developed our own minicomputer, our own software languages and our own operating systems. Today, our Corporation and quite a number of other corporations offer truly powerful distributed data processing systems that have a quarter-of-a-million, half-a-million bites of semi-conductor storage and millions of bites of mass storage.
|
From page 40... ...
I hope that the three companies can do it, because when they do it and they decide what all those protocols are, we will make our ARC system compatible with it and we will have the powerful ability to communicate with one another inter-system. Once we established the ARC network, the local architectural approach to an interprocessor, office-oriented, multi-function work station capability, we integrated not only the data processing capability, but also voice communications, word processing and electronic messaging.
|
From page 41... ...
We all know what they are: word or text processing, the whole idea of electronic typing; electronic message systems, as such, switching if you want to call it, but the ability to get information to another location much faster electronically than we have in the past through taking it and transcribing it onto paper and then mailing it, et cetera; data processing, we all know what that is. Most of us come from that kind of an environment, however, I will make the qualification that the data processing I am talking about is distributive data processing, dispersed data processing.
|
From page 42... ...
In this case, if you did have that data processing terminal, did have a word processing capability; you could use it to type a letter to the customer, make a correction in the file, get their correct bill out while only entering the changes that are necessary. To do this, interaction to the data processing files is key.
|
From page 43... ...
The cash is acquired much more quickly and this is the major result of business. On a weekly basis all of this information can be transmitted out to the data communications terminals on a volume basis.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.