This month's featured motion picture, A Case for Computers, was produced by Image Associates for IBM Corp. in 1983. The film opens with a narrator's summary:
"This is a film about computer hardware and software. It's a story about diskettes and peripherals and programs, all those computer things. But more to the point, it's about how all those computer things are being put to use in a profession we rarely think of as technological."
The film goes on to explain the use of IBM's 'computer things' in law firms in Chicago, Boulder, Austin, and Wilmington to maintain case files, search and retrive documents, automate billing and accounting, and shrink physical libraries. Watch it here:
Similar films -- also in Hagley's collection -- cover similar ground in making a case for computers in marketing and retail:
The Computer Comes to Marketing (1960)
The IBM Retail Solution (1983)
Kevin J. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at Hagley Museum and Library.