"System Technology"

This short film opens by introducing (without using the term directly) the crisis of control that occurred as American society began advancing at a more and more rapid pace, presenting computing systems as a solution to this ever expanding need for control of information. It then discusses the ways in which data processing and computers have made large distributed systems such as credit cards, large scale energy systems, and other complex industries possible. In particular, it goes into the development and testing of the air defense system the United States had put into place in the early 1960s. These highly complex systems were modeled by cross disciplinary teams of engineers, scientists, programmers, among others. Since it was not practical to launch an actual air attack on Americans in order to test the system, the correctness of the system was checked instead by creating a test set of data and calculating the expected outputs of the system by hand.

After mentioning the tedious labor required to input data to train the system, the film goes on to introduce several key enhancements to the system which automated the process further and further. For example, from human workers looking at maps and calculating coordinates with a ruler and some math, the system moved toward a punch card system that would automatically be read and validated by the system. Even this work saw automation, as the punch cards went from being generated by hand to being generated automatically given a form fed into the system. At the time of the production of the video, humans were left only to verify the final output of the system for inconsistencies.

The film finishes off by discussing other possible applications (many of which became real applications a few years later) of data processing. Among these are electronic educational programs and medical data processing, both of which are massive fields today.

This film is relevant to the theme of "information society" in that it very clearly demonstrates the capability of computers and data processing systems to enable humans to work far more efficiently, and at a larger scale. Without these systems, the infrastructures that we take for granted today, such as credit card networks, wouldn't be possible.

https://archive.org/details/6240_System_Technology_01_29_28_19