| Word Processor |
November 22, 2018
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| He worked for a city government. As his retirement year was approaching, he sometimes thought about how much his working environment had changed. When he entered his office, about forty years ago, there were no computers. At that time, some of his senior co-workers used abacuses. As he was not good at using an abacus, he was thankful of the calculator very much, which was invented and spread all over the world a decade or so before his entrance into the workforce. Maybe the invention of the calculator was sensational. A company's goal is to earn money. Money needs to be calculated. For a municipality, like his job place, the main role is to get taxes and use them for public services. Tax is needed to be calculated. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. If economies become good, governments and companies will make buildings. Building materials, land space, and financials need to be calculated. Good business might hire more workers. Workers' salary is calculated by the time, days and weeks that they work. Each household calculates how much  that they need for a monthly budget: for food, clothes, rent, education, allowances, etc. The remains are savings for the future. Maybe when the abacus was invented it was epoch-making. Later, the calculator. After several years of his entering the office, he first saw a word processor. His boss was a person who liked new things. The boss negotiated with the financial section, and his section got the first word processor in the office. It had a monitor in which only one line appeared. The key arrangement on the key board was not so functional. The movement was slow, so they didn't use it often, and then eventually it was not used. Originally there were two typists in his office and workers asked them when they needed to type documents. As his country uses kanji, hiragana, katakana, different from the alphabetical language countries, typing needed special machines and special skills. In his job, almost all documents were hand written. As a new worker, he made a lot of order and payment slips for paper, stationaries, and other office materials. Using carbon papers, he wrote on the top piece of paper the goods' name, price, number, tax, and sum, as well as the shop's name, its address, its bank's name, and the bank account number. One slip remained at his section, another slip was sent to the account section, and a third slip was sent to the bank. The first section that he worked in at the office was in the park construction section. If a land purchasing contract was done, he asked one of the typists to make a contract document. Decision making documents were written by hand, and the bosses stamped their seal on them as testimony that they saw it. Lands registration documents and tax exemption documents were written by hand, and were sent to the national office. Several years had passed after the first purchase of the word processor in his section. There appeared some more word processors made from various makers and started to become more wide spread. One worker in his office personally bought one, and started to use it for his job. Surprisingly, the other workers followed suit. He did too. Workers became disgusted to make many documents every day! They usually had a three line monitor, later it became 5, then even ten. They had a printer inside. They had a floppy disc reader so workers could save their documents. They couldn't exchange their documents with each other because each word processor maker varied. But even so, they were very useful because after making one document, workers could save it for the next time. They could easily change some places of the document to re-use it. Soon afterwards, copy machines appeared in his office. After a while, the two typists were asked to change their jobs, and one of them eventually quit. And now, no more word processors. Computers do everything. Maybe young workers don't know the existence of word processors. Thinking about computers, it was strange that he couldn't remember about his purchasing history of computers. He remembered that his first computer was Macintosh, but that was all. He remembered that he bought many computers for his private use, but he couldn't remember what he bought. He didn't use his personal computers for his work because the municipality made rules and guidelines about public information. On the contrary, he was able to remember about each word processor clearly, one by one ~the makers' names, the products' names, their shapes and colors, and even some functions. Maybe he was old and was feeling nostalgic for his old days. But even so, he felt this world depended on computers too much. Computers make our life more convenient, but, at the same time, more competitive. He felt stress with this increased speed. He thought what if there were only calculators and word processors in the work places nowadays. "Not so bad," he thought. |
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*abacus :そろばん
*addition :加
*subtraction :減
*multiplication :乗
*division :除
*slip :票
*seal :印
*testimony :証拠
*registration: 登録
*exemption :免除