New Devices Used With Computers

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31657, 18 April 1968, Page 8

New Devices Used With Computers

If any idea seems to lend itself to computer handling, the 1.8. M. Systems Research Institute in New York would try it, said Mr B. A. M. Moon, director of the University of Canterbury computer centre at Ham, on his return from three months study at the institute.

Among the improved devices Mr Moon saw were teaching machines which presented information, questions, and answers on a typewriter or on a fluorescent screen, in time with the student’s responses. The computer could now present picture images so that the “knight’s tour” in chess was explained both by picture and by written word. Mr Moon “wrote” a short course on computer arithmetic for use in this way. He also took a course on teleprocessing in this way. Tele-processing, had become almost a craze,, said Mr Moon. It involved computer processing of information from remote places—airline reservations, salesmen placing | orders direct to warehouses,, police checking records, doctors sending in complicated symptoms for computer analysis and receiving back the reactions likely from various treatments.

notes on structural problems. The same device could be extended to print tapes which would control rolling, milling and pressing machines in fabrication of the design. Mr Moon saw computer monitoring of patients in intensive-care units where heart beats, blood sugar levels, and much other information was recorded by a computer and any change set off an alarm.

Data acquisition was becoming a common term in computer jargon, Mr Moon said, it covered all the monster systems needed to store and analyse such information. They could become I too cumbersome for general | use, not because the com'puter was incapable of handling the information but be cause changes in systems involved too many ramifications. This could create more problems than were solved. All this meant that there was still an enormous demand for the small computer, Mr Moon said. It was estimated that this demand in the next five years would be double all computers now installed in the United States. For these reasons he did not foresee any national computer centre taking over the functions of the University of Canterbury computer centre, Mr Moon said. He said he was told that Canterbury might make a contribution to world knowledge by its experience in recording by computer very fast reactions in science and engineering.

Mr Moon said that computer airline reservations were called "old hat”—they had been done for five years. When information was dialled for in which a computer (not an operator) was called by telephone, the handpiece was placed in a box linked to a keyboard on which the caller pecked out his problem and received his reply. Voice communication with a computer was now feasible, Mr Moon said. Another device was graphical terminals, through which, say, a car designer drew his outlines and a computer sent back working drawings and