Computer firms face ruin

IMPORTANT questions are raised by the trial of male nurse Ekehard Weil in W Berlin this week.

Ekehard was sentenced to six years imprisonment after being accused of shooting a Soviet soldier guarding the Russian war memorial in the city last November.

First, within days of his arrest, Weil succeeded in escaping from a police escort down a subway entrance.

It was only due to his own stupidity that he was caught again.

The incident caused a political rumpus in the city, and torced its Social Democratic Mayor to say some strong words about police negligence.

But like the police in W Germany, the W Berlin force notorious for its right-wing extremist views.

Weil is an unashamed neoNazi. He told the court he did not actually fire the two shots which hit and wounded sentry Ivan Ivanovitch Tscherbak, but bought the rifle which did the shooting.

The actual shooting, he said, was carried out by an ultra-right group called the European Liberation Front'.

It was, he added, 'a necessary deed as it demonstrated in what a position Germany and especialls has no business in eimany', he told the court.

Weil's statement is revealing on several counts.

It shows how anti-communist and obviously fascist-inspired fused,, are able to involve conactivities by exploiting the division of Germany by imperialism and Stalinism at the end of the last war.

Slogan

British and French bases in That is why it is so important for socialists to cut the ground from under the feet of these fascist demagogues by demanding the unification of Germany.

This will only be achieved by revolutionary working-class action all the time defending the gains made in E Germany after the war when the old landowners and industrialists who backed Hitler were expropriated and the economy established on a nationalized basis.

If the Red Army were only there to defend these gains, thei its presence would be accepted by the E German working class.

But its role came out into the open in June 1953, when the workers of E Berlin, and then all E Germany, rose in revolt against their Stalinist rulers.

One of their main demands was for the unification of all Germany, and an end to the regimes of Adenauer in the West and Ulbricht in the East.

The Red Army, after several days of Kremlin hesitation, moved in to ruthlessly crush the uprising.

Banners

The leaders of imperialism watched with folded aris, secretly approving the Stalinists checking the movement before it spread to W Germany.

While Germany remains divided, groups like the 'European Liberation Front' will thrive.

Significantly the group uses the phrase 'Soviet imperialism' — a term also bandied about by anti-communist groups in this country-only like 'International Socialism', for one, they claim to be Marxist.

This organization took to the streets in August 1968, after the Kremlin invasion of Czechoslovakia, it called 'Soviet imperialwhich blended well with Maoist posters against "Soviet Nazism':

Tories, and there were several on such demonstrations, would ON MARCH 3, Systems International (UK) died, aged under one year. It had been formed to set up a chain of European computer service bureaus, using the experience gained in the field of management information systems by its parent company-Rolls-Royce.

Rolls had borrowed £300,000 from SI, which will never be repaid. But even before the Rolls collapse, the computer subsidiary was already facing trouble, along with the rest of the industry.

As the economic crisis comes out in the open, the effect is felt most sharply in those industries born in the technólogical explosion of the post-war boom. Computers. are the very symbol of those years. HIGH TECHNOLOGY The end of the boom The electronic digital computer-initially built to carry out the calculations for the Atomic bomb-was once only thought of as a very high-speed calculator.

Then, as the first machines came on the market in the early 1950s its organizing and decision-making possibilities began to become clear.

As the number, capacity and speed of computers grew, they were used to prepare payrolls, control chemical plants, make optimum allocations of company resources, guide space ships, aim nuclear. missiles.

The world computer population shot up from under 3,000 in 1958 to 14,000 in 1963. Today, it stands at over 100,000. Title picture: Computer consoles at Houston's manned spacecraft centre. Below: Computers used to trace criminals (left), and to monitor surgery.

I PART TWO Transistors replaced valves in the late 1950s and integrated micro-circuits replaced transistors eight to ten years later.

While a fast machine, in 1955, could be expected to carry out 100,000 instructions per second, descendant of 1971 might perform anything up to 10 mil As speed has gone up, the cost of doing a particular job has come down.

In 1955, a dollar of computer time would cover 100,000 instructions; today, it would give you 100 million.

Nor was it just a matter of better equipment - 'hardware' in the trade.

A large part of the expansion of the industry has been taken up with providing 'software'programmes of instructions which make the computer itself carry out the tedious job of translating into its own language the original wishes of the user.

But the computer was born under capitalism. Its development was undertaken for profit and var, not to lighten the burder of human labour. Now selling over £5,000m of goods and services a year, the industry was moulded by the conditions of the boom.

One US expert said of the 1960s: 'All you had to do was go to Wall St, shout "computer services" and they'd bury you in money.' JULI and 10.00 Sportsreel.

Python. 11.37 News, Fi.05 Sports results, Sports final, news, Computers were, above all, an American development. Seventy per cent of the world's machines are in the US, and about the same proportion are manufactured by one firm, International Business Machines.

For, despite the image of the individual whizz-kid designer or programmer, it was ultimately vast expenditure on research and development which decided • the conquest of the rocketing international computer market.

No one but IBM could have survived its two major disasters -the flop of the 'third generation' machine STRETCH ten years ago, and the mistaken decision not to wait for monolithic integrated circuits in the 360 series, first brought out a few years later.

No other firm could have gone it alone with its own language, FORTRAN - and forced other firms to stay in line.

Even the other five surviving US firms-Moneywell, National Cash, Univac, Control Data and RCA-can hardly keep up.

Honeywell now comprises the computer interests of General Electric, which recently got out of the game.

All these firms must maintain European and other international subsidiaries and associations to survive.

Sales Outside the Us, only. ICa, formed by merging nearly all the former British computer firms, has anything like the resources needed, even without the recession.

But while IBM annual sales are $7,500m and Honeywell $860m, ICL manages only $314m.

Research and development expenditure shows the relationship of forces: IBM spends $500m, Honeywell $119m, ICL $36m.

No wonder then that ICL is widely talked of as the next Rolls-Royce. Like Rolls, it used to have a considerable government patronage. few weeks ago, the "buy British' But, the Tories announced a £15.60p for 12 months (312 Issues) 87.80p for 6 months (156 Issues) £3.90p for 3 months (78 Issues)

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The impact of recession on the boom-time industry par excellence was signalled by the sharp drop in IBM profits in January last year. In two days, IBM stock $5m. The 1970 sales of this giant went on to show a 22 per cent drop on 1969.

Control Data actually recorded a loss on its computer operations, and like other firms, began to lay ofi computer staff. Over a thousand software firms are reported to have gone out of business in the US during 1970.