Jobman Caravan; Information Age

A. A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network. The show. Currently in elementary school. At whatever grade level. When those youngsters graduate from high school. And or college. They will go into the world of work which will be absolutely dominated and controlled. By computers. You start with the BASIC programming language. And we start out just the mechanics of the computer how to turn down an office cetera. And. Then we went through basic commands. And then there were going on towards more intermediate. Things. Right now we're currently working on graphics and editing commands. The extent to which individuals I'm not aware or have not been exposed

to what computers can and cannot do is going to. Put them at a greater disadvantage. Than what we have come to call. Disadvantage in the past. This will be an additional disadvantage on top of the other kinds of disadvantages that. That individuals would have. And it just creates an additional barrier for folks to have to overcome. In order to participate in the whole notion of mainstream society. Because of the accessibility of computers and the information that we have to go out on. We were able to do our design. Before of that you have this system which has the new distribution system that will go across. We were able to do that in a period of three or four months which if we had done it by hand would probably take us a couple of years to build. Today on the job man caravan information processing the computer age with entertainment breaks with Paul

and Millie Jackson. Hi I'm Bill Terrell. Woke up. We're in the age of the computer. In the 1950s there were only about 17 percent of the people employed in information processing occupations as opposed to manufacturing and people in the service industry. Yes it is more like 60 percent. Now people in information processing and that figure is steadily growing. It is estimated by the year 2000 some 5 million robots will replace human beings on jobs the computer industry. What does it mean and what will it especially mean to you and your family. If. You want to know why. Yes especially in the manufacturing area. That were being replaced by robots. The assembly has been automated. We've got more devices that control production. Look back at people.

And the pride in the work that you do. And the pride in the work which is not there. Thus the quality of products produced. Suffers. If you get a product made on Monday by a person it may not be the best that it possibly could be as a result of their weekend. Product built on Tuesday or Wednesday probably. Thursdays going back downhill on Friday. All you can think about is the weekend. But those and the attitude that you bring to work. Have affected the products that are produced. Computers robots on the other hand have good days. Every day. The computer age in my opinion is. Obviously the wave of the future. Everything that we do and see. In our everyday life. Is going to be governed by the use of computers. Its all part and parcel of the whole word processing kind of situation and we will find ourselves in computers.

Whether we like it or not going to control a lot of what we are able to do or unable to do. And to that extent it becomes important. In terms of education we begin to prepare young people as well as teachers to participate in that age. It's sort of reminds me of the problems we went through when we got into electronic. Typewriters. We had a number of the excellent secretaries who were very comfortable with manual typewriters in hand. And they looked at the needed new electronic typewriters as somehow being some strange foreign item or that they just didn't want to be part of. And not recognizing. That that kind of device is designed to make life easier. And I think that that's one of the things that computers are designed to do. To allow us to do. Many things. Faster fashion. More

efficiently. And to keep track of. The various kinds of things that we would normally use paper and pencil. So as I view with it it's a move into the 21st century. Where we begin to free people up from the kind of. Laborious task that they've been performing. By using the technology that's available which then gives folks. Time to do other kinds of things. One of those things would be to give people time to think. And to be able to process information in a manner that. Feeds it back to you in some coherent fashion. The growing computer age in which we find ourselves is limiting us while creating and changing other changes can read it may be seen in office automation to go into a paperless society so that we're not shuffling and reshuffling I want to report get a secretary to type it and send it back and get it rehashed

she has to reeky it and send it back to be edited again. We want to automate that so most of your messages most of your information handling transfer back and forth is all in a terminal. You don't have to go to heaven any longer to search through mounds and mounds of paper to find something it's all available to you at a terminal on your desk. Come. With us an opportunity to provide many youngsters. With an avenue. To. Technical. Mathematical. Skills. After the break with. The way a. Long. List.

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started using this computer. These that we have now. And it's really something that's going to benefit us in the next. Three years because not only the next three years and what we move on to middle school but but for the rest of our lives I think children as soon as they're able to read can be exposed to computers understand it may not come until later. But the basic language a computer language as a language is very easy to understand. The children I worked with here at Rosewood began in the fourth grade. However in Texas I'm told of a program in which Texas Instrument computers for use with children began using the computers in kindergarten. The main thing I would tell any adult is to do away with the fear that I see so many adults because a lot of adults tended I've run into tend to sort of stay away from computers themselves. I think there's some complicated machine that they can handle and. I'm glad to say

of course I have a nose in a mess that is picking up that fear. But that along with keeping up with what's happening computers themselves and realizing. Right now. Computers are fitting their lives so it is an automatic teller that's nothing but a computer and most of us know it and not nine times out of 10 you know you are affected by computers every day of your life one way or another. Today more and more computers are being used in the home. Well there are a lot of different ways a lot of people you know are doing their school work term papers anything to do with text editing. A lot of housewives are used for. You know following recipes. Any type of. Falling that needs to be done in the home such as household women Torii items for insurance purposes. A lot of people are doing their taxes on the microcomputers and then a lot of people trying to educate their children an hour

earlier and using the micro computers all the computers come with their own reference manuals. They're very easy to follow. You don't have to have any type of computer science background. The earlier manuals were very complicated very hard to understand and you practically had to be a computer science major to be able to sit and read one. But now that they've become more popular they've made their manual simpler. An easier to understand. And if you can't understand the ones that come with the computers there are all types of software packages and different books to help to assist you in learning about the computer. Some examples of how computers are used in the work world can be found in the television industry. South Carolina eat TV the nation's first statewide educational television network is using computers to its

advantage because of the accessibility of computers and the information that we have to build on them. We were able to do a design job for the DFS system which is the new distribution system that will go across the state. We were able to do that in a period of three of four months which if we had done it by hand would probably take us a couple of years to do. We developed the log that goes day by day and anon tells everyone what program comes up next and during the break what comes on and if we have a public service announcement what it is and what time it goes then. The computer then generates an instruction set that goes to the computer in master control room which runs our entire operation that runs the TV. We have not only our open air circuit that we broadcast own but we also

have for close circuit channels in which we distribute instructional television across the state and the computer does all the switching. All of the machine starts all the program selection for everything we do. We have thousands upon thousands of programs stored in our vault back here and we keep information on each one of these programs in the computer so that we are able to call up individual scenes and find out where a particular kind of scene is our exact information on a program that we did several years ago. So thats a real asset and having that ready Lake sessile and not have to dig it out by hand. We have off. A lot of money that we have to keep track of and be careful with. So we do all of our budgeting on computers and we do all of our accounting and reporting. We. Have a system here and E.T. the way that reports to each division

head what the status of their budget is exactly how much they've spent so they are in no way tempted to spend more money than they have or commit us to an obligation that we can't cover. According to Bill Hart television also uses computers in computer graphics. They're using computers to do their sophisticated production graphic design and special effects that people perhaps think a home and they don't realize have been generated by computer but it is a sophisticated field and more and more it's finding its way into the traditional operating areas of television information processing. But computer age will continue after this caravan and entertainment approach. Thanks to

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YES. Yes yes. Thanks thanks. Thanks Thanks Thanks Thanks Thanks. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. People in our society many of them are computer.

The New York Times estimated in 1981 that there were some computers in the country. And by the end of this here 83 It is estimated that some two million seven hundred sixty thousand computers will be. Computer science and learning the computer. They will also need the support of their parents. The advice that I would like to give to parents as a relates to the computer age is that. That they need to take advantage of any. Efforts that are being put forth. To provide them to provide them with opportunities to to become familiar with the computers. At this point. They may have to seek out for example Radio Shack has courses where at a nominal fee and I'm not. Necessarily plugging RadioShack but I mention them because I'm aware that they do offer courses

for anyone. Just very basic courses to move to acquaint an individual with what a computer can or cannot do how do you turn it on. How do you make it wrong. Given a certain software package how do you then make that package speak back to you if you will. So I think that it becomes important for parents to become as knowledgeable as their children are going to become. Home because if not. You know we will be giving children instruction. That. Their parents will have will know absolutely nothing about would push the parent at a disadvantage. And if they are buying a video games for their youngsters. It might be possible for them to buy. Some other kinds of. Love. Program that will be educational for the children that will occur if their awareness is right. To think about all the things that they can do. Who's with the search.

It's sort of. Just like you Lisa BB or Kilgore systems engineer offers this advice the best advice if you have the opportunity to take a computer course or to do a class through a computer. By all means do it if you have the opportunity from your parents to get a home video that can be improved to include a small personal computer. Ask for that too so that you can sit down and get hands on training and get used to a computer get used to it. Get used to the feel of a computer and how it works it's not a frightening. If you're preparing for a secretarial. If you're going to a secretarial or technical school don't just learn to take shorthand and type on a regular typewriter. Make sure you are seen with the latest advances. Automating office

products pay in that kind of processing make sure if there's a computer available in that area to enhance your job to make you more productive Make sure you get trained on it so that when you call for an interview and they add they will ask you Can you say do you know how do you do this. He was already be in a position and said Yes I have worked with either training directly on it or. Somehow they've got an education but make sure you get the opportunity to get and do it. According to Dr. Donald Henderson an assistant school superintendent computer industry professionals can assist schools more. It would be helpful if. If the individuals in the industry who have that expertise could begin to communicate with school people. And get some notion or create a marriage if you will in terms of what the education industry needs as it relates to to assisting youngsters. Even in instruction. And then take that information and apply

it. To the technology and then give us the kind of software programs. That will be helpful to you and not only youngsters who have the aptitude to do it but also youngsters who are experiencing difficulty in school because there is an advantage in having these youngsters also. Have some facility with computers. They can they can learn basic skills. It can help them reinforced multiplication tables. They can learn. Math skills an awful lot of things that they can learn. Via the computer that they may have had difficulty learning with just a textbook. If the job markets got you in a bind. Or maybe you are thinking about retraining. Perhaps you haven't even reached the stage of life where you decided what you'd like to do. Let us help you next week from the job and caravan take a look at some of the more promising occupations for the machine to deal with machines you know all kind of gauges doing

things I know I still have because I like working with my hands and plus you have computers in it too so it's not just manual labor. You get a chance to really think I was an assistant for about a year. And it was to be a routine matter and I wanted it. More. Out of the year year I've demonstrated assisting and hygiene please more money than assisting. And you're in a sense your own boss to a certain extent. Well presently be employed much outlook in the area. It's good and I should think. National wide would be very good also. As you know today with all what you Phasis put on prevention. Preventive medicine. And this is one of the functions in my opinion off the high Genest so Until then stay in a positive frame of mind to.

Build your own. On behalf of the staff of the Caribbean thanking you for joining us. Oh.