Word: digital
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...urge President Carter to take some form of action. The basic, underlying rate of inflation has been stuck since mid-1975 at 6%, already an unacceptable figure. A 15-page memo circulating within the Administration warns that the base rate is about to accelerate. Can double-digit inflation be far behind...
There are other tests. Foreign nations once looked to the U.S. as the example of a powerful economy that could grow without serious inflation, a feat attained by few countries. The fact that double-digit inflation could hit the U.S. too, as it did in 1974-75, came as a shock abroad as well as at home. Now overseas observers see the U.S. bragging that its economy is growing at one of the fastest rates in the industrial world, yet whining fearfully that inflation is likely to result. The spectacle is compounded by the nation's refusal either...
...speeding up still more rapidly than had been supposed. Even the old CPI showed prices rising in January at an annual rate of 8.7%, about double the pace in November and December. But according to both of the new indexes, the rate was 10%, which reaches the dreaded double-digit range. The increase was exaggerated by ice and snow that snarled rails and roads in January, leading to shortages that jacked up food prices. But wholesale prices have been rising rapidly enough in the past few months to threaten more jarring consumer-price jumps. Julius Shiskin, the savvy Labor Department...
Working with long strings of Is and 0s would be cumbersome for humans-but it is a snap for a digital computer. Composed mostly of parts that are essentially on-off switches, the machines are perfectly suited for binary computation. When a switch is open, it corresponds to the binary digit 0; when it is closed, it stands for the digit 1. Indeed, the first modern digital computer completed by Bell Labs scientists in 1939 employed electromechanical switches called relays, which opened and closed like an old-fashioned Morse telegraph key. Vacuum tubes and transistors can also be used...
...wires in a rectangular grid made up of thousands of wires. Depending on the direction of current in the two wires that pass through its hole, each doughnut is magnetized in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. This represents either a 1 or a 0-a "bit" (for binary digit) of information. Because each core has a specific location in the precisely designed grid, it can be "addressed" almost instantly: information can be read from any doughnut by means of a third wire passing through each core. These fragile and expensive core memories are now being replaced by semiconductor memories...