On Wed, 2015-01-07 at 08:31 -0500, Darr247 wrote:
> On 07 January 2015 @01:37 zulu, Always Learning wrote:
> > You seem to forget. Computers were invented to perform repetitive tasks.
>
> Or maybe, some of us just seem to remember it differently.
> In my opinion, robots/automatons were invented to perform repetitive
> tasks; computers were invented to perform logic operations faster and
> more-reliably than humans.
My recollection was influenced by my discovery in 1966 of Power Samas
(later acquired by ICT) 40? 36? column small punch cards feed-in to a
printing machine to produce invoices for a then major international
publisher. The replacement/upgrade was a Honeywell 1200 with tapes, 80
column card reader, printer and the ubiquitous air conditioning and
humidity control system. Luxuries like keyboards, disks, screens had not
been invented. It was plain, simple, effective and fairly reliable Data
Processing.
Two years later on a smaller H-120 I was writing commercial Cobol
programmes for a Norwegian angling distributor - orders, invoices,
statements, stock control. Again it was essentially repetitive
processing done much faster than before the usage of mainframes.
Computers can not function without logic. One of the the most important
advancements was of the "stored programme" feature instead of having to
reload the data processing programme, contained on punched cards in
strict sequence, every time a job needed doing.
Never bumped into "robots/automatons" anywhere at all in Data Processing
nor encountered anyone using that term. Computers evolved very slowly
from automated machine processing. A major advancement was made at the
USA's famous Bell Labs (subsequently destroyed in the interests of
shareholder profits) who invented the DTMF. It was the IC.
SPAM was another USA invention and so too were Microsoft-suitable
viruses.
--
Regards,
Paul.
England, EU.
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