Work Station President

Back in the 1960s, a banker friend took me on a tour of his bank's computer. In the lobby, employees operated card readers and other wonderful devices that sorted checks, recorded withdrawals and deposits, computed balances, issued statements, etc.

We went to the bank's basement and entered a "clean" room. The walls were lined with large equipment cabinets, several of which had reels of recording tape on the front - these reels spinning forward and backward as bank employees operated the computer from their work stations. Upon returning to the bank lobby, I realized that all those work stations counted for little. It was the sprawling computer in the basement that was doing the work.

A couple of decades later, in the 1980s, my company installed our first computer system. Made by Wang, it consisted of a central unit (a micro version of that old bank's computer!) with work stations on each employee's desk. Each station consisted of a keyboard and a monochrome monitor, not unlike the CRT monitors used for PCs, but that was before PCs.

You could do all sorts of things at each work station... but the work station itself was nothing. Disconnect the cables connecting it to the central processing unit and the work station no longer functioned. Enter errors into the central unit, and every work station will repeat those errors

I think of those early computers every time I hear President Obama speak. Looking like a well-groomed intellectual, he stands in front of his teleprompter and sounds very wise indeed. Unplug the teleprompter and he is like a disconnected work station on our old Wang computer. He no longer functions intelligently.

When Barack Obama makes an unscripted statement about a current event, his comments are often ignorant and destructive: "The police acted stupidly"; "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon"; etc.

Our concern must be with whomever is programming Obama's "central unit". And we must realize that if we re-elect Barack Obama, we re-elect those programmers.