Beating the Language Barrier

"Computers don't like dealing with people," complained Air Force Scientist Charlton Walker last week. "They just don't understand our language." Walker's complaint was directed at the biggest remaining impediment to everyday use of computers: the fact that a skilled programmer must often spend days reducing the elements of a problem to numerical or electronic code before he can hold even a brief conversation with his machine. To remedy this, at least half a dozen U.S. corporations have been trying to develop a machine that can communicate in a speedier and simpler language--pictures. Now Itek Corp. of Lexington, Mass., a relative pygmy among electronics companies, hopes to grow bigger with such a device, which it calls the EDM.*

To beat the language barrier between man and machine. Itek has, in effect, hitched the digital computer to the draftsman's stylus. With a photoelectric light pen, the operator of an EDM can formulate engineering problems graphically (instead of reducing them to equations) on a console that looks like a flat, unflickering television screen. The operator's designs pass through the console into an inexpensive computer, which solves the problems and stores the answers in its memory banks in both digitalized form and on microfilm. By simply pressing buttons and sketching with the light pen, the engineer may enter into a running dialogue with an EDM, recall any of his earlier drawings to the screen in a millisecond and alter its lines and curves at will. The whole system, Itek engineers claim, can be hooked up to permit long-distance design conferences between field sites such as a missile launching pad and the home office.

Already Itek has had a couple of nibbles for the EDM (anticipated cost: $500,000 for outright purchase; $2,000 to $3,000 for monthly rental), hopes to be ready to deliver the machine within twelve months. Visitors to Itek's Lexington lab have predicted the EDM will not only make possible vast cost savings in the engineering industries but also revolutionize computer technology. Among those who have come to inspect the EDM so far: urban developers looking for better ways to plan cities, railroaders seeking quicker ways to unsnarl traffic, aerospace engineers who hope for swifter and finer design work.

*Initials variously translated by Itek executives as Electronic Drafting Machine, Engineering Design Machine, or Engineering Drafting Machine.

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