Automated offices—a pleasure to go to work?

Press, 10 September 1985, Page 24

Automated offices —a pleasure to go to work?

Offices are already changing under the impact of the microchip and they will change even more dramatically as automation equipment changes.

GARETH POWELL

risks his reputation as a forecaster to examine the

possibilities.

The problem with talking about office automation is that no one has ever properly defined the term in a way that achieves universal agreement. My idea of office automation may well be somewhat different from yours, and certainly different from someone else’s. Yet there are trends which can be seen, there are straws in the wind, which make it possible to make a fairly intelligent guess as to the direction in which office automation is proceeding. Making predictions has always been a thankless task. You are disbelieved; mocked. You become an object of derision. If you get it wrong people never forget. For years they will point at you with scorn as the person who swore

bubble memories were here to stay. Yet few will remember, and less will care, if you stood up two years ago and made a full and detailed report on precisely the way the new rash of laser printers would affect the market. And got it right. I rarely learn from my mistakes, and once again I am willing to risk my reputation by forecasting what will happen on the morrow. In the fully-automated office of tomorrow, the stand-alone work station will become more and more important, Converging technologies will make it all encompassing, all powerful, and cheap. This stand-alone work station will be the cornerstone, the essential artefact of the fully-auto-mated office of tomorrow.

None of the machines and techniques I will describe, coming together to form that stand-alone workstation, arises from my heated, fevered brow. They already exist, mainly as working prototypes. No one has yet put them all together into a single co-ordinated concept. But they will; they most surely will. And in the relatively near future.

Within the next years all information workers will have on their desks three or four boxes. One will be a keyboard — ergonomically designed in a sort of curved cinema organ shape and holding rather more keys than the ones which exist today. I would like to predict that the desperately inefficient Qwerty keyboard will have disappeared, re-

placed by the far more logical and efficient Dvorak, but I am too much of an embittered realist now to think this fine dream of my youth will ever come to fruition. It is a hopeful sign that more and more manufacturers are offering the Dvorak keyboard as an option, but, I fear, it is an awful example of too little, too late.

One of the boxes will be a visual display unit. Instead of looking like a lineal descendant of a telly it will be curved like a Cinemascope screen and have a resolution sharper than a 35mm slide. How much sharper? About 5000 times sharper. (In case you think we have typeset a few superfluous noughts in there I will spell it out: five thousand times

sharper.) It will, but of course, be in colour. It has been, theoretically, possible to produce such a sharp screen for some considerable time, but the problem has been the shortage of computer memory available. For the sort of display we are talking about you need, say, three to eight megabytes of memory for each frame of the screen you want to display. That is a lot of memory. Until recently it was, indeed, financially, if not technically, impossible to allocate as much memory as that for display purposes. Computers that had one megabyte of memory were considered extremely advanced. Indeed, they still are. But now the day of the one megabit chip is already with us, and we can see on the horizon a sign no bigger than a man’s hand which tells of the possibility of memories a thousand, ten thousand times that size. With memories of such capacity, glorious, high-de-finition colour is totally practicable.

I know it is practical and possible because I have seen and used such a display unit made by Toshiba on an experimental basis. The technology has been there for some time. What it needed was the power to release it. A third box will be the communications unit. And it is here the concept of convergent technologies will come into its full fine flower. I am not talking about the One Per Desk computer / telephone / messaging centre which is produced by ICL using a chip designed by Sir Clive Sinclair.

That is indeed a step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go. The new communications box will essentially be built around the facsimile transmission machine, not the computer and not the telephone. This is not a view that is widely held among industry observers, but it makes such logical sense I am willing to stick my neck out and say it is the only way to go.

All other roads will turn out to be dead-ends. Consider the facsimile transmitter as it stands today. A small miracle. You feed a sheet of paper with information in at one end, and, like magic, it appears out of another machine, sometimes half the world away, an exact facsimile. It can sometimes do this with an A 4 page of information in less than 10 seconds. To send its information out into the ether the facsimile transmitter is connected to the telephone line by a modem (the word stands for modulator demodulator) which translates the image at the transmitting end into a language the telephone system can easily and accurately carry and then a modem at the other end decodes it. These modems work

under optimum circumstances at 9600 bits of information a second. Which is some way faster than the 300 bits a second which is generally standard among personal computers today. So this communications box, which we now call a facsimile transmitter, can also be regarded as a high-qual-ity information transmitting unit, a high-powered and sophisticated modem. This facsimile transmitting unit is also a photocopying machine. Sure it is. It works on exactly the same basic principle as all the other photocopying machines. It is also a high quality printer which can easily be linked to a computer to produce printing not of near letter quality but of near typesetting quality. The technique is the

same. The information is still in the standard digital language the computers know and love. And the facsimile transmitter can happily accept such information and turn it into letters and memoranda of a quality and style which would make the angels weep with envy. (Notice the very existence of this machine means the widely touted concept of the paperless office is some way away. I will not repeat the old line that we will see the paperless office on the same day we see the paperless lavatory, but it is true). This communications box can also keep a watching eye on the Press Association service and accept information from videotex and from other messaging services. And do it in colour, printing out the information on plain paper in complete silence. Which means that our basic facsimile transmission machine has been yet again metamorphosed, this time into a total messaging centre. The computer — powerful, small, intelligent — is

now a part of a whole, not an island unto itself. Small, discreet, immensely fast and packed with memory — half a gigabyte of random access memory, much of which will be used to drive the visual display unit. Anything that is not contained in that immense built-in memory will be available on laser-written discs which, as the night follows day, will eventually dominate the marketplace. These discs will be small and will hold 740 megabytes of information, which is more information than one office worker can process in one year. They will cost about $3O each and will be virtually indestructible. In quiet moments in the office, they could be used as frisbees without the risk of losing one bit or byte of information. In this office automation scenario of tomorrow no longer will you have a photocopier, and a printer and a facsimile transmitting machine and an information collecting modem and a personal computer — most of them standing mute, idle and .unprofitable during the day. They will all be as one. A computer and an electronic communications and messaging unit and a facsimile tranmitter and a modem and a photocopier and a printer all contained in one basic black box as übiquitous as the telephone and taking up the same amount of space on a desk as, say, a telephone book.

The fasimile transmitter is the heart of this unit, the telephone line is the umbilical cord. The idea of majoinetworks connecting every work station to a mainframe computer seems to me, unlikely. More probable

will be a policy of horses for courses. In some companies, it will be appropriate for this stand-alone office automation centre to be directly linked to a mainframe computer.

In other circumstances, it may be linked into a small work group of five or six stations. And sometimes the only links will be through messaging services. The precise method of electronically connecting the machine will depend on the needs and uses of the work station.

If correspondence is still going to exist, will we be able to dictate our masterly summaries of nothing into the computer and thus do away with the tyranny of the keyboard? Not for many moons to come.

Getting a computer to talk, albeit like an android,

is relatively easy. Getting it to listen and understand what is said by all too fallible humans is another ball game. Although progress is reported on all fronts, total success is a long, long way off; not, I think, in my lifetime. Dictating machines will still exist. One doubts they could get smaller and more efficient than they are today, but no doubt they will. The automated office of the future will not be in the home. The concept of everyone beavering away happily in the back bedroom while all the offices in the central business district collapse from disuse is improbable.

It is true more and more executives will be carrying out work on portable computers away from the workplace, although recent reports from Europe show

this is less of a factor than was previously thought.

True, the American trade journal, “Today’s Office,” suggested last year that SUSIOO billion worth of work is being done in the United States each year by white collar workers working partially from home. How they arrived at this amazing figure and the precise costings used is something less than clear. Sure, offices may be dispersed. Offices may become smaller units placed nearer residential districts so will be able to walk to work. But offices, albeit automated, electronic offices, will ever be with us.

And they will be very pleasant places in which to work. Punching the bundy will be a privilege and a pleasure. Not a chore.