Word: computerized
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Computers have giant memories, but are exasperatingly literal-minded. The U.S. Patent Office encountered this problem in an acute form when it began planning a computer designed to extract from its memory all earlier mentions of a patent-seeking idea. Patents are described in ordinary English, and ordinary English proved...
To leap this communication barrier, Engineer-Lawyer Simon M. Newman of the Patent Office has been working out a synthetic language called Ruly English that is especially adapted to a computer's huge but simple brain; unlike ordinary, "unruly" English, it gives one and only one meaning to each...
Newman has found prepositions especially unruly. There are about 25 of them, and their meanings overlap irrationally. The preposition through has at least 13 meanings. It can mean by use of (to speak through an interpreter) and finished with (through with work). Newman proposes to replace unruly prepositions with new...
More complicated words of Ruly English are meant to eliminate confusion caused by differing points of view. Both a watch spring and a heavy bridge girder are flexible in some degree. Both are also somewhat rigid. All objects, in fact, lie somewhere on the scale between extreme flexibility and extreme...
Business Machines. Among the new office gadgets displayed in Manhattan's Coliseum: Philco's Transac 52000, the first commercial all-transistor computer (rental fee: $28,000 to $40,000); Thomas Collators Inc.'s completely automatic rotary drum collating machine, which sorts and staples, detects misses or doubles...