Versatile Executive
It is this high-volume capacity, speed, and accuracy that makes the computer a welcome new employee in most business operations. An example is the Johnson’s Wax system linking its facilities for rapid management reaction to changing conditions. Headquarters is linked to twenty three warehouses and sales offices, and today’s work is based on yesterday’s inventory instead of last month’s.
Computers schedule hotel reservations, and handle accounts payable and receivable for the hotel industry. Auto-parking, now a $500 million a year business, leans ever more heavily on computers for ticket-issuing, car-counting, traffic direction, charge-figuring, and collection. The freeway too has its computers, though there have been minor setbacks like that on the New Jersey Turnpike where an automatic toll-card dispenser was mistaken by slow-thinking people for a collector and its working was jammed with coins and battered by abuse when no change was forthcoming! Man will take some educating as the machine finds wider employment.
The computer has been seen in the publishing business primarily as a tool for searching lists and printing addresses. Now it is beginning to take over more important duties such as typesetting. The new daily Arizona Journal is the first newspaper to make use of this technique.
From use in other businesses, the computer has grown to fostering a business of its own. An example is in the production of payroll checks by specialty firms, and safeguarding against bad checks with such services as Telecredit, a computer-run system that spots bad checks upon interrogation from its member stores.
In Waterbury, Connecticut, a computer helps home-buyers and realtors by listing all available homes in the area. Three reports are produced: a total listing, a listing by style, and a listing by price. Bell Telephone in New York uses a computer system to deliver its 9 million directories to subscribers in the city and suburbs. The rapid system permits changing of delivery orders even while the books are at the printers. A computer method of making sausage recipes is now available to all packers. Remington Rand developed this application at its UNIVAC Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University.