Part 12

Another space-tracking computer called SPADATS has been installed at NORAD Combat Operations Center at Colorado Springs. This computer has the assignment of around-the-clock cataloging of all man-made objects in space, a sizable and growing task. At Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Air Force maintains an EDP, or Electronic Data Processing project with a more earth-bound job of cataloging. Started back in 1957, this project has as its primary task the efficient allocation of manpower for the global Strategic Air Command team.

At nearby Edwards Air Force Base, an IBM 7090 computer is helping to develop the Dyna-Soar manned space glider. This computer is also doing work for the X-15 program, and research on fuels, lunar probes, rocket nozzles, and nose cones. At Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, a new system of keeping track of jet engine parts, so that they go back on the proper engine, uses a recorder “gun” wired to a central control computer. Engine parts are metal tagged with coded letters which the recorder “reads” and transmits to the computer for filing.

Computers play a big part in the “largest and most sophisticated logistic data and message communications system in the world.” Delivered to the Air Force in January of 1962, “Comlognet” connects 450 different air bases and other installations. This system started out modestly, handling about 10 million punched cards a day, and is heralded as only a forerunner of an automatic system which will some day take care of the complete interflow of data among widely separated military and civilian locations.

Besides being part of complex navigation and bombing systems, computers help the Air Force to score the results of practice bombing missions. Computers control the launching of Sidewinder missiles from aircraft and also permit accurate “toss-bombing” of nuclear payloads from fighter bombers. These computers do all the mathematics and let the pilot approach his target from any direction, at any speed and altitude. The new Skybolt ballistic missile, launched from the B-52 bomber, has its own guidance computer, which is actually a digital differential analyzer, a hybrid device like that described in an earlier chapter. One of the largest single computers in the Air Force is that called Finder. Using 70,000 transistors, it does analytical work on electronic countermeasures.

Today there are some 110,000 aircraft flying the skies in this country, about double the number ten years ago. Not only the quantity but also the speed of aircraft has increased, and the job of the aircraft controller has become a nightmare. With the lives of air travelers in his hands, this overworked FAA employee has until recently used the same equipment that served in the days of 180 miles-per-hour piston-engine transports.

We have discussed some examples of the computer as a director of air 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.

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_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!” ]

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“_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.