Today computers are a part of everyday life

Essay by kaycCollege, UndergraduateA+, September 2002

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In the mid-1970s, microchips had reduced the cost of the thousands of electronic components required in a computer Today microchips are a part of everyday life, they are in their simplest form a digital watch or more complexly computers manage power grids, telephone networks, and the money of the world. Society has embraced the microchip and accepted it for its many powers, which can be used for business, education, research, and warfare.

The McDonalds fast food chain is an example of a company that has embraced computers to help productivity and lower operating costs. The McDonalds kitchen has become a computer-timed machine with the invention of the microchip. The workers have in essence become robots controlled by the computer to achieve maximum productivity. The computer knows the procedure and alerts the worker of events in the procedure and all the worker must do is execute what the beeper of buzzer means.

With such little knowledge of the making of the food, workers have become disposable.

McDonalds managers work even more closely with the computers that control them. The computer generates a graph of expected business and tells the manager how many people to schedule and when, all the manager does is fill in the blanks with names. McDonalds computers also keep close track of sales and expenditures, the central office can check . . . how many Egg McMuffins were sold on Friday from 9 to 9:30 two weeks ago or two years ago, either in an entire store or at any particular register. The main things computers do in a manual job is to speed things up, thinking generally slows this operation down. and for this reason computers have made manual jobs ones of extreme monotony and no creativity.

Microchips inside computers allow information to be shared very quickly.