Word: punching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nightmare of the new automation is the optical character reader, which shoots out 30,000 pieces of mail an hour and shows no mercy. A postal clerk has about a second to read an address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next...
...waltz between Sugar Ray Leonard, 33, and Roberto Duran, 38, was the top-grossing fight in history. Next month George Foreman, now bigger than Mount Rushmore and twice as old, will face perennial white heavyweight Gerry Cooney. Someone will get hurt -- probably the first one who throws a punch -- and people will pay to watch. Like rock 'n' roll, sports used to be a young man's game. But with the graying of America, the Stones go rolling on, and geriatric jocks are big business...
Today, SWAT still exists, but organized campus protest against the final clubs is nowhere to be seen. Schkolnick has graduated, her complaint is in bureaucratic limbo, and the final clubs continue to punch every fall...
Invented by Robert Cahlander and David Carroll of the Robot Aided Manufacturing Center in Red Wing, Minn., the robot has a 400-lb. arm that dispenses discs, makes change and processes credit-card purchases. Its computer brain also tracks inventory and cues up tunes for customers who punch their requests on a keyboard. The designers may franchise an army of the devices. Behind every great robot, of course, there is a human -- in this case a worker who drops by once a week to replenish the stock and collect the receipts. And maybe, says Carroll, "clean the glass with...
...scary," he muses, glancing at the rock video playing silently on the TV screen overhead. "Someday I'll be the punch line...