PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 367
Simultaneously, however, the number of employees in other service and
administrative areas increased despite the use of computers (such as in
banks, insurance companies, and government administration) because
the job demands, as well as the need for labor, increased.
Lastly, the Soviet bloc countries also found themselves faced with
questions about the future of work and its social consequences in light
of the “scientifi c-technical revolution.” Thanks to the troublesome demo-
graphic situation, the GDR had been suff ering from an enormous short-
age of labor for a long time. Rationalization measures and automation
therefore seemed to be the best strategy at the time. Moreover, there was
really no job crisis to speak of in the GDR.^56 Yet the expectation that ratio-
nalization could overcome the labor shortage in the country proved to be
overly ambitious. Although some automated and computerized assembly
lines were created in parts of the steel and chemical industries, not to
mention at Carl Zeiss Jena, the need for repair and maintenance person-
nel increased, off setting the labor gains that had been made by modern-
izing production. Furthermore, more personnel were needed from year
to year in order to keep up production levels in the country’s antiquated
production facilities.^57 Research has shown that the machine tool indus-
try already met with considerable diffi culties as it tried to transition to
NC (numerically controlled) systems that read orders from data carri-
ers, which meant that it never moved on to the next phase of automatic
CNC-controlled industrial handling and production processes.^58
The introduction of the Quelle system in 1957 serves as an indicator
of just how far ahead West Germany was at a very early point.^59 The
Informatik-System-Quelle, developed by the German company Standard
Elektrik Lorenz (SEL), which patented the name “Informatik,” marked the
advent of information processing.^60 The system attracted attention world-
wide because it proved that computers could not only calculate, but also
“control processes.” This opened a whole realm of new possibilities for
the application of computers in industry and administration. At about the
same time that the Quelle system came onto the scene, the foundation for
data processing outside of the universities was laid with the installation
of the Univac computer by Remington Rand in Frankfurt am Main. Thirty-
fi ve courses were off ered in 1957 in order to train the fi rst fi ve hundred
“operators.”^61 Shortly thereafter, the insurance company Allianz began
using the fi rst IBM computer in the country.
From the mid-1960s, the number of computers installed in companies
increased considerably. A gap emerged between the few major large-
scale users on the one hand and a growing group of mid-level data tech-
nology users on the other. Generally speaking, until the beginning of the
1980s, the larger the company, the more likely it was to have its own