Part 30

Heavy industry made use of the machines. The steel plants, petroleum and chemical plants, and even the designers of highways were among the early users of computer techniques. There was of course good reason for this phenomenon. Faced with problems involving many variables and requiring statistical and probabilistic approaches, these people could make the best use of machines designed for repetitive computations. The refiner with a new plant in mind could simulate it in the computer and get an idea of how, or if, it would work before building his pilot plant. Today the notion of dispensing with even the pilot plant is getting serious consideration.

One program used by a gasoline producer analyzed thirty-seven variables and thirty-seven restrictions, a matrix that could never be evaluated by ordinary methods. Textile fiber research is another example, with thread tests run on dozens of samples and averaged statistically for valid conclusions. B. F. Goodrich put the computer to work in its laboratories at such tasks as multiple-regression studies of past production of processes like polymerization and the running of a batch of new material on the computer.

These applications were accomplishing a two-fold benefit. First, years were being telescoped into weeks or even days; second, complete investigation rather than sketchy sampling was possible. Optimum solutions took the place of the guesswork once necessary because of the lack of sufficient brainpower to run down all the possibilities. Still there were scientists and designers in other fields who shook their heads loftily and said, “Not for me, thanks.” The computer was but a diligent clerk, they held, relieving the engineer of some onerous chores. It could do nothing really creative; that must be left to man and his brain.

By now many industrial firms had purchased or rented computers for the technical people so that they would not have to fight for a place in line at the payroll computer. Civil engineering agencies, perhaps a hundred strong, used computers to design bridges and plan and lay out highways. Designers at the Tudor Engineering Company of San Francisco put its Bendix G-15D to work planning the highway that Contra Costa County will need in 1980. Almost all of our fifty states now use computers in their highway departments. In 1960, Georgia solved more than a thousand highway bridge design problems in its computers. Besides doing the work faster and cheaper, the computer produces a safer product. For example, if substandard materials are programmed in, the computer will print out a warning or even stop working altogether so that the error can be corrected.

Steel companies, like Jones & Laughlin, use computers not only to run production mills, but also as research tools. Three hours of operation of a new furnace can be simulated in the computer in thirty seconds. Tracing the steel back to its ore, the computer is used again. The Bureau of Mines has used the machines for several years; they are helpful in problems ranging from open-pit operation, grades of ore, drill-core data logging, reserve calculations, and process control.

General Electric Co., Computer Dept.

Computer operation of Jones & Laughlin steel mill. ]

Gradually, then, the resistance was worn down. Grudgingly at first, and accepting the computer only as an assiduous moron, engineers in other fields put it to work. Complex machine operations like gear-shaping were planned and carried out by computers that even punched out tapes for controlling the production tools. Optics designers switched from desk calculators to electronic computers. Mechanical engineers in jobs from ultrasonic vibrators to tractor design became users of computers. Mass spectrometry, heat-exchanger design, and waterworks design joined the jobs the computer could do.

The computer had figured in plotting trajectories for missiles, and in the production of aircraft; engineers found it could design them too. Back in 1945, an analysis of twenty-one different flight conditions at each of twelve stations of an airplane fuselage took 33 days and cost more than $17,000. Today, by using a high-speed computer instead of a desk calculator, the analysis is completed in a day and a half, at a cost of $200!

The last of the diehards seemed to be the electronics people themselves. A survey conducted by a technical journal in the field showed that in 1960 many designers were not using computers in their work. Admitting that the computer was a whiz just about everywhere else, the electronics engineer still could say, “The machine is great on paperwork, but I do creative work. The computer can’t help me.” Other reasons were that computers were expensive, took much time to program, and were helpful only with major design problems. Fortunately, all designers do not feel that way, and progress is being made to put the computer to work in the electronics field. It is helping in the design of components (Bendix saves ten man-hours in computing a tenth-order polynomial and associated data) and of networks (Lenkurt Electric saves close to 250 engineering hours a week in filter network design). Bell Telephone uses the computer approach in circuit analysis, and Westinghouse in the design of radar circuitry. It is interesting that as we move up the design scale, closer to what the engineer once considered the domain of human creativity, the computer still is of great value. In systems design it is harder at the outset to pin down the saving in time and the improvement in the system (the latter is perhaps hard to admit!) but firms using computers report savings in this field too.

One interesting job given the computer was that of designing the magnetic ink characters to be used in its own “reading” applications. This project, conducted by Stanford Research Institute, is typical of the questions we have begun to ask the computer about its needs and ways to improve it. A larger scale application of this idea is that of letting the computer design itself. Bell Telephone Laboratories developed such a system, called BLADES, for Bell Laboratories Automatic Design System, to design a computer used in the Nike-Zeus antimissile defense system.

A wag once noted that the computer would one day give birth to an electronic baby. His prophecy came true perhaps quicker than he anticipated, but there is one basic difference in that the progeny is not necessarily a smaller machine. The giant LARC, for instance, was designed by lesser computers. As A. M. Turing has pointed out, it is theoretically possible for a simple computer to produce a more complex one. This idea is borne out in nature, of course, and man is somewhat advanced over the amoeba. Thus the implication in the computer-designed computer is far more than merely the time and money saved, although this was certainly a considerable amount. The BLADES system in twenty-five minutes produced information for building a subassembly, a job that required four weeks of manual computation.

Notable improvements in the general-purpose computer are doing much to further its use as a technical tool. Present machines do jobs as varied as the following: personnel records, inventorying, pattern determination, missile system checkout, power-plant control, system simulation, navigation, ballistic trajectory computations, and so on. Special computers are also provided now for the engineer; and among these is the Stromberg-Carlson S-C 4020 microfilm recorder. Engineering specifications are put into the computer and the machine can then produce on request mechanical drawings as required by the engineer. Data stored in the memory is displayed on a Charactron tube. There is little resistance to this type of computer, since the engineer can say it is doing work below his level of ability! Of course, the draftsman may take a dim view of computers that can do mechanical drawing.

Bell Telephone Laboratories

Engineer checks design information for first computer built from complete information furnished by another computer. Shown is a subassembly of the computer, which will be used in the Army’s Nike-Zeus antimissile defense system. ]

After a rather hard to explain slow start, then, the computer is now well established as a scientific and engineering tool. Blue-sky schemes describe systems in which the engineer simply discusses his problem with the machine, giving specifications and the desired piece of equipment. The machine talks back, rejecting certain proposed inputs and suggesting alternatives, and finally comes up with the finished design for the engineer’s approval. If he laughs overly loud at this possibility, the engineer may be trying to cover up his real feelings. At any rate the computer has added a thinking cap to its wardrobe of eyeshade and work gloves.

Digital Doctor

Medical electronics is a fairly well-known new field of science, but the part being played in medicine by the computer is surprising to those of us not close to this work. Indicative of the use of the computer by medical scientists is a study of infant death rates being conducted by the American Medical Research Foundation. Under the direction of Dr. Sydney Kane, this research uses a UNIVAC computer and in 1961 had already processed information on 50,000 births in ninety participating hospitals. Punched-card data include the mother’s age, maternal complications, type of delivery, anesthetics used, and other pertinent information. Dr. Kane believes that analysis by the computer of this information may determine causes of deaths, after-birth pathological conditions, and incapacity of babies to reach viability. A reduction in infant mortality of perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 annually is believed possible as a result of the studies.

Another killer of mankind, cancer, is being battled by the computer. Researchers at the University of Philadelphia, supported in part by the American Cancer Society, are programming electronic computers to act as cancer cells! The complexity of the problem is seen in the fact that several man-years of work and 500 hours of computer programming have barely scratched the surface of the problem. A third of a million molecules make up the genes in a human cell, and the actions of these tiny components take place many times faster than even the high-speed computer can operate. Despite the problems, some answers to tough chemical questions about the cancer cells are being found by using the computer, which is of course thousands of times faster than manual computation.

If you were discharged from a hospital in 1962, there is a chance that your records are being analyzed by a computer at Ann Arbor, Michigan as part of the work of the Commission on Professional and Hospital Activity. Information on 2-1/2 million patients from thirty-four states will be processed by a Honeywell 400 computer to evaluate diagnostic and hospital care and to compare the performance of the various institutions.

In the first phase of a computerized medical literature analysis and retrieval system for the National Library of Medicine, the U.S. Public Health Service contracted with General Electric for a system called MEDLARS, MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System. MEDLARS will process several hundred thousand pieces of medical information each year. New York University’s College of Engineering has formed a biomedical computing section to provide computer service for medical researchers. Using an IBM 650 and a Control Data Corporation 1604, the computer section has already done important work, including prediction of coronary diseases in men under forty.

The success of computers in these small-scale applications to the problems of medicine has prompted the urging of a national biomedical computer system. It is estimated that as yet only about 5 per cent of medical research projects are using computer techniques, but that within ten years the figure will jump to between 50 and 75 per cent.

An intriguing possibility is the use of the computer as a diagnostic tool. Small office machines, costing perhaps only $50, have been suggested, not by quacks or science-fiction writers, but by scientists like Vladimir Zworykin of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. Zworykin is the man who fathered the iconoscope and kinescope that made television possible. The simple diagnostic computer he proposes would use information compiled by a large electronic computer which might eventually catalog the symptoms of as many as 10,000 diseases. Using an RCA 501 computer, a pilot project of this technique has already gathered symptoms of 100 hematological diseases.

Another use of the computer is in the HIPO system. Despite its frightening acronymic name, this is merely a plan for the automated dispensing of the right medicine at the right time to the right patient, thus speeding recoveries and preventing the occasional tragic results of wrong dosage. More exotic is a computer called the Heikolator which is designed to substitute for the human brain in transmitting messages to paralyzed limbs that could otherwise not function.

The simulation of body parts by the computer for study is already taking place. Some researchers treat the flow of blood through arteries as similar to the flow of water through a rubber tube, analyze these physical actions, and use them in computer simulation of the human system. The Air Force uses a computer to simulate the physical chemistry of the entire respiratory and circulatory systems, a task that keeps track of no less than fifty-three interdependent variables.

Dr. Kinsey of the Kresge Eye Institute in Detroit is directing computer work concerning the physiology of the eye. According to Kinsey it was impossible previously to approximate the actual composition of cell substances secreted from the blood into the eye. Even those whose eyes no longer serve them are being benefited by computer research. The Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, uses an IBM computer to develop reading devices for the blind. These complicated readers use a digital computer to convert patterns of printed letters into musical tones. Further sophistication could lead to an output of verbalized words. Interestingly, it is thought that the research will also yield applications of use in banking, postal service, and other commercial fields.

Russia is also aware of the importance of the computer in the medical field. A neurophysiologist reported after a trip to Russia that the Soviet Union is training its brightest medical students in the use of the computer. Such a philosophy is agreed to by medical spokesmen in this country who state that no other field can make better use of the computer’s abilities. Among advanced Russian work with computers in the biomedical field is a study of the effects on human perception of changes in sound and color.

Visionary ideas like those of radio transmitters implanted in patients to beam messages to a central computer for continuous monitoring and diagnosis are beginning to take on the appearance of distinct possibilities. Some are beginning to wonder if after it has learned a good bedside manner, the computer may even ask for a scalpel and a TV series.