Readerś Forum: Controlling Urges and Infections—Computer System Design for Epidemiology

Abstract

By now, most of us have seen IBM's version of Charlie Chaplin's tramp in their omnipresent advertising campaign: each commercial begins with the little tramp struggling valiantly to keep up with the complexity of modern business, only to find himself up to his neck in hats or, more recently, roller skates; of course the IBM personal computer soon arrives to save him by replacing cacophony and chaos with computational harmony and the soothing sounds of smooth skating. It is no accident that the little tramp was chosen to represent the harried everyman—Charlie Chaplin made the connection himself in his film Modern Times. There, as in the IBM campaign, he struggled valiantly but vainly to master the madness of modern mechanical times. IBM's message is clear: computers do not increase the madness, but cure it; the micro is the machine to tame the machine age.