British Universities Film & Video Council

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Computers

Series

Series Name
Mining Review 18th Year

Issue

Issue No.
7
Date Released
Mar 1965
Stories in this Issue:
  1. 1Computers
  2. 2Coal and Soap
  3. 3'By the Light of Knowledge ...'

Story

Story No. within this Issue
1 / 3
Summary
NoS synopsis: The use of computers in the coal industry for payroll and other applications
NCB Commentary - This is the inside of a computer.
And these are some of the people who work with it. What has all this got to do with the business of winning coal? Plenty - because computers are playing an increasing part in keeping our coal industry in the forefront of industrial efficiency.
Take a man’s wages - the payout at the end of a hard week’s work. All over the country. men collect a wage packet, and inside it, with the money, is a pay slip.
The slip carries written information - tax deductions, allowances and so forth. The same basic details have already been punched into a card, in a pattern of holes.
And the information on the cards can be fed through machines to make an instantaneous record on magnetic tape - to become part of the memory stored up inside a computer system.
All a computer is, really, is a lighting calculator which can refer to what it has been told, and print out the answer to the complicated mathematical problem it has been set. Which brings us back to Bill Smith’s pay slip.
In an industry the size of coal, the uses of computers are enormous. Information of all kinds can be recorded and stored and filed away for when it’s needed.
It’s goodbye to the old days of bulging manila folders in dusty storerooms. A neat row of plastic tapes holds the equivalent of a warehouse.
Wage calculations are just one very simple example. The real use of computers in an industry of half a million people lies in helping to make decisions - to produce the facts on which policy is based, in production, in assessing demand, in marketing, to keep an efficient industry that one jump ahead.
Keywords
Science and technology; Mining; Computers and computing
Written sources
British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue   1969, p.50
Film User   Vol.19 No.224 June 1965, BIFA Bulletin p4.
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963
Credits:
Sponsor
National Coal Board
Production Co.
National Coal Board Film Unit

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