Word: punch-card
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Rudely stated, this message lies at the heart of Vonnegut's work. For all his roundhouse swinging at punch-card culture, his satiric forays are really an appeal for a return to Christlike behavior in a world never conspicuously able to follow Christ's example. For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable, to the unbearable. Misused, modern science is its prime instrument. "I think a lot of people teach savagery to their children to survive," he observed recently. Then he added, saying it all, from Cain...
Still, McNamara cannot suppress the virtue or vice of his efficiency altogether. He is too coldly crisp when he ticks off his punch-card proofs-one, two, three-that the U.S. possesses "assured-destruction forces." He seems most himself when speaking of the Department of Defense as the "greatest single management complex in history." Nothing gives him more evident satisfaction than having pruned logistics expenses by $14 billion in five years through his "planning-programming-budgeting system." In the end, his standard is efficiency, and his integrity lies in remaining loyal...
Cambridge voters in the April 30 presidential primary will vote on punch-card ballots--and an electronic voting system will be able to tabulate the results within minutes after the polls close...
...more things change at Compagnie des Machines Bull, France's largest home-grown computer manufacturer, the more they remain the same. Machines Bull, named for the Norwegian whose punch-card system was the company's first product was deep in debt and floundering in mismanagement when, in 1964, General Electric bought half of the firm for $43 million. Charles de Gaulle had hoped for a "French solution" to Bull's problems, but when none could be found he reluctantly permitted G.E. to buy in. Since then, Machines Bull has continued to lose money. It suffered...
...adding machines than ever before," according to Chairman Ray R. Eppert, 64, although it has long since dropped the manufacturing of typewriters and cash registers. The company has capitalized on its years of experience with such hand-operated machinery by applying it to the mechanical aspects of computer technology: punch-card processing, preliminary programming and complex operating instructions. Burroughs paces the industry in providing these essential "software" items along with the hardware -the computers themselves...