Word: rand
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...Guns. Despite last week's headlines, and the FTC's reputation as a very litigious lady, the commission has been trying to reduce its legal assaults. It issued 415 cease-and-desist orders last year-12% fewer than in 1963. Its $28,500-a-year chairman, Paul Rand Dixon, a husky Tennessean, scorns what he calls "the squirrel-gun approach" of suits against individual violators, prefers to lay down ground rules for entire industries...
Aspirin & Cigarettes. A onetime crusading aide to the late Senator Estes Kefauver, Rand Dixon works hard at appearing more reasonable than he used to be. When he became boss in 1961, he scarcely concealed his distrust of big business, often squabbled with his four commissioners. Frustrated by the fights on high and uneasy about the commission's broad and petty swoops on business, many of the brightest young FTC lawyers quit. Dixon did some hard thinking. He fought the morale problem by pushing pay raises and speeding promotions, began to side with staffers more sympathetic to business; recently...
...first electronic computer, used 18,000 vacuum tubes as circuits and quick-acting switches. Though they were a big advance, vacuum tubes proved too expensive, too unreliable and too bulky: ENIAC weighed 30 tons and took up 1,500 sq. ft. of floor space. Until 1954, when Remington Rand (now Sperry Rand) first sold its UNIVAC to industry, the few computers in the U.S. were largely experimental and custom designed...
...another 3,000 in Western Europe, where industry and laboratories are just beginning to computerize. The payoff: 74% of the U.S. computer market, a dominance that leads some to refer to the industry as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs." The dwarfs, small only by comparison with giant IBM: Sperry Rand, RCA, Control Data, General Electric, NCR, Burroughs, Honeywell. The computers have also spawned the so-called "software" industry, composed of computer service centers and independent firms that program machines and sell computer time (for as little as $10 an hour) to businesses that do not need a machine fulltime...
...great ironies of the computer is that it would rate as a low-grade moron if given an IQ test. "With a computer," says Mathematician Richard Bellman of the Rand Corp., "everything is reversed. If a one-year-old child can do it, a computer can't. A computer can calculate a trajectory to the moon. What it cannot do is to look upon two human faces and tell which is male and which is female, or remember what it did for Christmas five years ago." Bellman might get an argument about that from some computermen, but his point...