THE THIRD WAVE
The main symbol of this upheaval is an electronic device called the word processor—some 250,000 of which are already at work in U.S. offices. Manufacturers of these machines, including such titans as IBM and Exxon, are bracing themselves to compete in what they believe will soon be a $10-billion-a-year market. Sometimes called a “smart typewriter” or a “text editor,” this device fundamentally alters the flow of information in the office, and with it the job structure. It is, however, only one of a great family of new technologies about todeluge the white-collar world.
In Chicago in June 1979, at the convention of the International Word Processing Association, some 20,000 perspiring visitors trooped through an exhibition hall to examine or try out a bewildering array of other machines as well—optical scanners, high-speed printers, micrographic equipment, facsimile machines, computer terminals, and the like. They were looking at the beginning of what some term the “paperless office” of tomorrow.
In Washington, D.C., in fact, a consulting firm known as Micronet, Inc. has brought together the equipment of seventeen different manufacturers into an integrated office in which paper is verboten. Any document arriving in this office is instantly microfilmed and stored for computer retrieval later on. This demonstration office and training facility integrates dictating equipment, microfilm, optical scanners, and video terminals into a functioning system. The objective, says Micronet president Larry Stockett, is an office of the future in which “there are no misfiles; marketing, sales, accounting and research data are always up to the minute; information is reproduced and distributed at hundreds of thousands of pages per hour for a fraction of a cent per page; and . . . information is converted back and forth from print to digital to photographic media at will.”
The key to such an office of the future is ordinary correspondence. In a conventional Second Wave office, when an executive wants to fire offa letter or memo, an intermediary is called in—the secretary. Thisperson’s first task is to capture the executive’s words on paper—in a notebook or a typed draft. Next the message is corrected to eliminate errors, and perhaps retyped a few times. After that it is clean typed. A carbon or Xerox copy is made. The original is dispatched to its destination through the mailroom or the post office. The duplicate is filed. Not counting the initial step of composing the message, five distinct sequential steps are required.
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