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THE NEW TECHNOLOGY can be applied across virtually the entire range of industrial and office work. This makes it impossible in a short pamphlet to do more than summarise just some of the most important developments. The application of these to particular industries needs to be studied in depth by the workers affected. To help you to know what to look for, here’s a brief run-down on seven forms the new technology takes.
THIS IS THE microelectric machine which is probably going to affect the working lives of the greatest number of people in the next couple of years.
It allows one typist to produce as much material as three or four produced previously. It does this by:
Word processors are relatively cheap machines. Some cost so little that it is reckoned that they can pay for themselves through saving on typists’ wages in nine months or less.
There are already some thousands of them in use in this country, and there is no doubt that attempts will be made to introduce them into all large offices in the next year or two. The result could be a devastating destruction of one of the slightly better paid fields of employment for women.
This does not mean that all traditional typing will be taken over all at once by word processors. As a Financial Times supplement on office equipment recently noted, ‘the word processor is not the answer to all typing problems...’; there are a range of less complex typing jobs in which cheaper electric typewriters are just as fast; and the small office in which one person does a range of clerical jobs would not benefit as yet from the processor (Financial Times, 23 October 78).
However, it does mean that skilled typists are going to be in much less demand that in the past. Scarcity will no longer force up their wages, and they will be under continual pressure to prove that they can do jobs more quickly and more cheaply than word processors.
THIS IS LIKE a miniature television screen and is attached to some other device, like a word processor or a computer terminal key board.
Its screen shows material which is being typed out on the key board (e.g. the words typed onto a Word Processor), material which has been called up by tapping the correct codes from electronic files (floppy discs, tape etc.), or the answers provided by the computer to problems it has been set.
So a typist using the most modern word processors does not directly type on to paper at all; instead the words she types appear on the VDU screen; she can then correct them before they are printed, recall slabs of type from the word processor’s memory, insert them in the text, and only then press a key that causes the material to be printed out.
In banks, VDUs are already being used to ‘call up’ from the computer’s memory details of customer’s accounts. Different VDUs can be linked to the same computer, or even, via computer network systems, to computers many miles away. Thus, a message can be typed on a VDU in London and ‘call up’ material from the memory of a computer in New York.
THIS IS ONE of a number of devices (the others include tape and laser-record discs) that can be used to store information typed in by a key board; information can then be recalled in a fraction of a second by typing the right code on the key board.
One floppy disc can contain the equivalent of hundreds, one laser-record disc thousands, of pages of text. And it only requires the touching of a few keys to locate a particular piece of text to make it appear on the VDU.
THESE ARE ALL different ways of using a television set to display data from a computer.
Ceefax (BBC) and Oracle (ITV) are teletext systems that do this by broadcasting many hundreds of pages of text, which the viewer then selects from by using the controls of a special attachment to the set. With teletext systems there is now an additional device available, a ‘printer’, which types what appears on the TV screen on to paper. In Japan experiments have already taken place at using these print-outs instead of Daily Papers.
Prestel, the Post Office Viewdata system, is even more sophisticated than Ceefax and Oracle. It links a television via the ordinary phone system to a central Post Office computer. Then by tapping a few keys, the individual can recall any of the information stored in the central computer. When fully operational, the system could enable a subscriber to call up any one of millions of pages of text. Thus Prestel could replace the classified pages of newspapers, or do away with the need for libraries to keep vast stacks of reference books – indeed, one can envisage the time when any text in a huge library like the British Library could be displayed on your television at the touch of a couple of keys.
THESE ARE ALREADY beginning to replace cash registers in some stores. They take away from the cashier the need to look at the product being bought, to remember its price and to clock it up.
Instead, the computer terminal uses a laser beam from an ‘optical pen’ rubbed against the label of the good to read a ‘bar-code’, automatically clocks up the price, and provides the customer with a printed out receipt of the goods bought. All the ‘cashier’ has to do is rub the label with the ‘pen’.
But the application of this machine goes far beyond just speeding up the work at the check-out.
The computer keeps a complete account of what has been sold at all the terminals; it can then automatically check-up on the level of stocks and just as automatically reorder when they run low, doing away with many traditional stock control jobs. The time will not be too far distant when it is directly linked to warehouse computers, automatically ensuring the necessary movement of goods from the warehouse to the store and doing away with warehousing jobs as well.
Finally, there is already talk of direct link-ups between the computerised check-outs of stores and the computerised accounts of banks. One day the customer will merely have to produce a check card, tap out an account number on a simple key board, and the computer terminal will add up the cost of the goods bought, directly move the money from your bank account to the store’s – and just as automatically stop you buying anything if your account is overdrawn.
All this may sound a bit far fetched. But computerised check-out systems are already being installed. The Financial Times on 6 October 1978:
‘International Stores is to spend £333,000 on a one year project to evaluate competing check-out systems at two of its super-stores. Both aim to improve service to checkouts and the flow of goods to supermarket shelves ... Both systems can be converted to incorporate laser bar code readers which could revolutionise checkout systems by eliminating individual prices’.
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THE APPLICATION of electronics to manufacturing industry is not new. Numerically controlled machines have been taking on work previously done by skilled workers for more than two decades. And pre-programmed automatons have been able to do certain routine, repetitive jobs.
However, that does not mean that the chip is not going to revolutionise manufacturing industry as well as the office.
Firstly, it is going to cut the cost of automation immensely. Automated techniques which used to be available only to the biggest firms for the biggest operations are going to become viable across the whole of industry.
Secondly, a great deal more flexibility is going to be possible. Until now the use of computers in the factory has been restricted by the need for very expensive programming for each individual operation. This has meant it has not been economical to computerise short batch production runs – and 70 per cent of production in British manufacturing industry production.
The microrevolution will make it possible to buy (or even hire) pre-packed programmes for doing particular jobs, and to get computerised tools which will be able to learn completely new jobs without any further programming. For instance, welding machines are now available which ‘learn’ what operations to perform by taking recordings of the actions made by a worker who does a job, and then imitating them.
Already certain of the robots are entering production. The Guardian could report on 25 April 1975:
‘Fiat’s welders – they are robots – have just started to produce cars as part of an automated welding system ... Instead of being conveyed along an assembly line, car body sections are picked up by a remote controlled robot carrier (operating under instructions from a central computer) which slides along the magnetic floor ...
‘It moves automatically into a work bay where the body parts are clamped together in time for the robots to stretch their arms to perform the traditional welding activity. The body then slips itself elsewhere in the area for other welding operations, before being slipped back to what remains of the traditional assembly line.
‘75 out of the 105 people originally needed on welding in this area are now no longer needed ... and the 30 who remain become white collar maintenance workers rather than blue collared operators ...‘
Fiat’s research organisation are now trying to use microprocessors to provide the robot welders with the ability to recognise whether the weld has been done to a high enough standard – thus doing away with the need for inspectors.
It is not only in Italy that the ‘robot’ is becoming a reality. Leyland have ordered 28 Unimate Welders for its Longbridge factory. The Unimate is ‘a self-contained computer-directed machine with a memory capable of performing human functions’, according to the firm who sell it. It costs 50p an hour to run, and can work 98 per cent of its life, 400 hours at a stretch, in conditions which are not safe for human beings.
The Financial Times reported on 10 October 1978:
‘A company making steel casings at Bad Merienberg in West Germany was the first to purchase an ESAB joint tracking unit ...
‘The larger part of the engineering facilities in the plant are used to produce heavy duty transformer casings and transformer cooling systems ...
‘Previously the tank casings had been welded by hand at an average rate of one metre every 9½ minutes ... The company now found that weld time was reduced to 2½ minutes a metre.’
On 14 December 1978 the same paper reported that:
‘Unimation has developed a lightweight and precise industrial robot PUMA, intended to operate on an assembly line side by side with human workers ... A measure of PUMA’s dexterity and accuracy is the fact that it can insert lamps into automobile instrument panels ... Although they are still at the pre-production stage, several units have been sold for job evaluation. For example, General Motors are using a number in an experimental small batch assembly programme ...‘
However, the impact in most factories is going to take longer to materialise.
The reason is that the equipment to which the microprocessor is attached on the factory floor is usually itself very costly. While the electric typewriter part of a word processing machine probably costs only a few hundred pounds, the mechanical equipment to make a single robot welder or cutter probably costs thousands. To redesign and re-equip whole factories around the robots, in the way in which the Fiat factory has been, costs many millions. Companies will be chary about, spending these millions until existing equipment has worn out.
That is not all. Many things manufactured at present contain intricate mechanisms that require fiddly work that it would be difficult to get relatively cheap robots to do – for example, the wiring of a car. Even at Fiat the robots do not yet save money. ‘It costs more than the traditional method’, the Guardian report admitted. It is in the long term that the robots’ time will come. At Fiat, ‘It is expected to pay its way through making subsequent model changes much cheaper.’ (Guardian, 25 April).
Robots will eventually be let loose in all the car factories – but only after car models have been redesigned to have robot production in mind.
Pressure is on for robotisation to begin in earnest: in Sweden, for instance, there are currently 700 robots at work, and the Association of Electromechanical Engineering Industries estimates there will be 5,000 by 1985. Already in the US there are 3,000 robots, in West Germany 500 and in the UK 200. On the basis of a much looser definition of a ‘robot’ the Japanese claim 70,000.
But full robotisation of factories is going to be a much slower process thaqn automation of many offices. The word processor, the VDU and the floppy disc will transform the working lives of thousands of people in the next five year; it will be 5 to 15 years before the robot has the same scale of impact.
FROM THOSE INVOLVED in the building of complex computer networks based upon the microprocessor, the common of garden wire conductor is a nuisance. It is subject to wear and tear, needs continuous maintenance, is limited in the number of computer messages it can carry, and is subject to interference via induced currents produced by electric currents in nearby wires.
The ‘optical fibre’ is the alternative being developed to overcome these faults. It is made of a special sort of glass, rather than of metal; and instead of carrying electric currents, conveys messages via pulses of laser light that travel along the fibre at an immensely high speed.
Like the robot, the optical fibre will take many years to come into full operation: the cost of tearing up all the systems based upon wire tomorrow and replacing them by optical fibres would be immense. But, again like the robot, as the fibre is brought into use, tens of thousands of jobs will be destroyed – both in the field of maintenance of wire based systems, and in the industries that manufacture wire and cables.
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Last updated on 7 March 2010