After-luncheon remarks

Abstract

I CANNOT help feeling flattered by our chairman's introduction. In referring to me as an expert, however, he put me under the obligation of reminding you of the definition: "X" stands for an unknown quantity, and "spurt" is a drip under pressure! Our field has had a most remarkable growth in the last half decade. Counting exhibitors, paid registrants, and guests, we have about fourteen hundred people at this three-day meeting. Those of us present at this luncheon would have been considered quite a sizable computer group five or six years ago. It is probably safe to say that there is no other field of technology which has grown so rapidly as our own. And I include even television, at least technically, although we have to admit that so far they have tapped a slightly larger mass market! One of the things that is most encouraging in the computer field is the strong increase in interest we can now observe in the detailed control of manufacturing processes and in factory automation. The first involves both operations research and the mechanization of clerical operations; the latter brings us close to the realtime control problem, since it envisages the actual control of tools by digital programming devices. Earlier in this meeting we heard a paper by Vernon Weihe on another aspect of real-time control, namely, the mechanization of the air-traffic-control problem with a digital computer as the central logical organ. There is little doubt that this class of problems, requiring accurate decisions over a complex field of information at more than human speeds, represents tremendous application potential. There is still another field in which we may expect major developments: a short label might be "information retrieval." The insurance companies, from whom we have heard at this meeting, the magazine subscription offices, patent and legal searchers, technical libraries, and many other agencies are faced daily with searching problems which tempt us by their size, complexity, and even their commercial importance. We are so prosperous now, and of such interest to the business and popular press, that it has become quite difficult even for applications men to keep track of all these new areas of interest. A new class of experts—or perhaps in view of our chairman's introduction, I had better use the term "synthesists"—who are interested in the broad application of high-speed computers in all fields, has recently been given considerable prominence. I have named this species in honor of its earliest and