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Cover Quote: November 1973

ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING INDUSTRY

Nanoseconds, megabytes, and sophisticated submarket control…Here is the Telex-IBM court’s view of the electronic data processing industry as a whole:

Finding 1. This case involves the electronic data processing industry—an industry based upon a concept and system of reckoning (binary) as simple as turning on and off a switch; in which transmissions are timed in billionths of seconds (nanoseconds), with storage capacity (memory), measured by millions of combinations of bits of information (megabytes); in which numerous problems involving logic or arithmetic functions are separately but simultaneously worked upon and instantly solved within a single system; in which in their own peculiar language machines communicate with one another (multiprocessing) and then in words understandable by humans may present printouts of results at the rate of as much as 2,000 lines per minute; in which devices facilitate maintenance by the detection and isolation of their own malfunctions or mistakes (diagnostic programs); upon which most other industries of the country and countless businesses, as well as science and space explorations, vitally depend; in which product and market developments seem almost kaleidoscopic when viewed from the outside; which appears unique in monopoly context by reason of its youth and apparent dynamics, but which by the same token in this ultra-modern setting may be unprecedented also because of increased inducements for, and vulnerability to, sophisticated submarket control on the one hand, and massive industrial espionage on the other.



- J. A. Sherman Christensen
Telex Corp. vs. International Business Machines Corp., 1973
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