Computing as a tool for human augmentation

The IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, has experienced a factor of twenty times increase in the past ten years in the amount of time its people spend using computers interactively in their work. This is twice the penetration rate of television in the 1950s. A similar degree of penetration is expected to happen in the rest of industry in the next ten years. That will mean a major departure from traditional data processing, with computers being used as tools to augment the users' abilities in all phases of their work. Examples of human augmentation, as seen in the work of several researchers, are offered in this paper. The integration of large numbers of personal workstations into this environment has given us new understanding of how to work. The causes, impediments, and consequences of these changes are described, with emphasis on human requirements for bandwidth, response time, tools, on-line storage, and computing capacity.