Computer Pollution?

Less than a generation ago, a species of future shock overcame many laymen when they contemplated a new invention--the electronic computer. There was vague anxiety about machines that could think, a corner-of-the-eye vision of humanoid steel creatures winking out their possibly baleful computations. It was--and still is--modern man's version of the Frankenstein anxiety.

Now, of course, in most industrialized nations the computer is as familiar and useful as the automobile. It could in fact create some of the same problems. Last week, at a conference in Chicago marking the 25th anniversary of the invention of the electronic computer, one speaker adumbrated a world another quarter-century from now when almost everyone would possess a computer the size of a cigarette package and almost as cheap. Frederic G. Withington of Arthur D. Little, Inc., described two opposing tendencies in the development of computers: the increasingly economical sharing of large computers by multiple users and the proliferation of minicomputers. If the second line is followed, then in a throwaway society Withington envisions a day when little computers will be "scattered around the country as thickly as empty beer cans."

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