Word: computerize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The NASA engineers studied a plan to send a McDonnell Douglas F-15, America's hottest jet fighter, into a computer-guided supersonic climb to about 80,000 feet and then blast Skylab out of the sky with a non-nuclear rocket. This idea was dropped when the scientists concluded...
Yet even these losses would pale beside a far less publicized jolt that the insurance group is suffering. It involves the labyrinthine world of computer leasing, a honey-tongued Texas hustler, the big gest and most prestigious U.S. banks and IBM. As a result of many forces, the Lloyd'...
The underwriters' latest loss began with a promotion by Charles ("Chris") Christopher, now 33, a Dallas sharpie who honed his selling skills peddling encyclopedias and waterbeds in his teens, and then created Surety Industries, a computer leasing firm. The business worked this way: Surety bought computers from manufacturers. It...
Eager to expand his business, Christopher met in 1974 with Lloyd's Broker Peter Nottage and persuasively proposed an idea for a computer-leasing policy that the underwriters eventually accepted. Under it, if corporations or government agencies broke a lease after the obligatory noncancellation period, Lloyd's underwriters...
Executives of other leasing companies were soon rushing to London to buy the new policy. San Francisco-based Itel became the biggest user, taking out 48% of all the computer policies that Lloyd's underwriters issued. The leasing companies owned by Citicorp, Chase Manhattan and Bank of America, among...