BEYOND MASS PRODUCTION
Today’s machines compress these five steps into one, making thesequential all but simultaneous.
To learn how-—and to speed up my own work—I bought a simple computer, used it as a word processor, and wrote the latter half of this book on it. To my pleasure, I found I could master the machine in a single short session. Within a few hours I was using it fluently. After more than a year at the keyboard I am still amazed by its speed and power.
Today, instead of typing a draft of a chapter on paper, I type on a keyboard that stores it in electronic form on what is known as a “floppy disk.” I see my words displayed before me on a TV-like screen. By punching a. few keys I can instantly revise or rearrange what I have written, shifting paragraphs, deleting, inserting, underlining, until I have a version I like. This eliminates erasing, “whiting out,” cutting, pasting, stripping, Xeroxing, or typing successive drafts. Once I have corrected the draft, I press a button, and a printer at my side makes a Jetter- perfect final copy for me at vision-blurring speeds.
But making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of such machines and violates their very spirit. For the ultimate beauty of the electronic office lies not merely in the steps saved by a secretary in typing and correcting letters. The automated office can file them in the form of electronic bits on tape or disk. It can (or soon will) pass them through an electronic dictionary that will automatically correct their spelling errors. With the machines hooked up to one another and to the phone lines, the secretary can instantly transmit the letter to its recipient’s printer or screen. The equipment thus can capture an original, correct it, duplicate it, send it, and file it in what amounts virtually to a single process. Speed increases. Costs go down. And the five steps are compressed into one.
The implications of this compression extend far outside the office. For among other things, this equipment, linked to satellites, microwave, and other telecommunications facilities, makes it possible to end-run that overworked, malfunctioning, classically Second Wave institution, the Post Office. Indeed, the spread of office automation, of which word processing is only a single small aspect, is integrally linked to the creation of “electronic mail” systems to replace the postman and his burdensome bag.
In the United States today, fully 35 percent of total domestic postal volume consists of transaction reports: bills, receipts, purchase orders, invoices, bank statements, checks, and the like. However, a vast amount of mail flows not between individuals but between organizations. As the postal crisis has deepened, more and more companies have sought an alternative to the Second Wave postal system and begun to build pieces of a Third Wave system instead.
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