Articles

Criteria for Usefulness of Computers in Offices

This is a 1982 article. Its observations are mainly confirmed, but some of the measures it advocates are still not implemented.

This article was written between March 1980 and sometime in 1982. It was given as a lecture at a conference sponsored by IBM in Germany and published in Textverarbeitung und Burosysteme, edited by Albert Endres and Jurgen Reetz. I should have published it in America, but I hoped to improve it and then forgot about it. I think its main contentions have been confirmed by experience with personal computers, but some of what it advocates hasn't been realized even yet, e.g. a worldwide file naming system, email based on pc to pc phone calls, and a file description language.

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