Technological Visionary John Diebold Dead at 79

By Michael Jay Friedman, Washington File

Engineer and consultant introduced innovative technologies

John Diebold, a pioneering advocate of computerized technology and forecaster of its development and use, died December 28 at his home in Bedford Hills, New York. He was 79 years old.

Diebold's efforts to persuade businesses to adapt new technology were inspired by the self-correcting mechanisms of the shipboard anti-aircraft systems he witnessed during World War II.

In 1951, Diebold (pronounced DEE-bold) earned a master's degree at Harvard Business School, where he authored a paper entitled "Making the Automatic Factory a Reality." Diebold then worked for private consulting firms and was fired on three separate occasions, each time for insisting that clients introduce computers into their operations.

"I was too early," he later said.

Diebold then expanded his graduate paper into his first book. Published in 1952, Automation was among the first accounts of how factory and office operations might be ripe for automation.

Two years later, he founded the John Diebold & Associates consulting firm. Until he sold the business in 1991, the firm was Diebold's vehicle for persuading his business clients to adopt the latest in computer and information technology.

The firm was not connected with Diebold Inc., the manufacturer of automatic tellers and voting machines.

Among the technologies introduced through Diebold's efforts were the first electronic network linking bank account records and allowing customers to bank at any branch (1961), a pioneering system at Baylor University Hospital that made medical records and statistics available in electronic form, and a 1963 plan for newspaper reporters to enter stories by keyboard directly into a computer console for future editing -- two decades before word processing became common.

Interviewed by the New York Times in 1965, Diebold said "Today's machines, even more than the devices of the industrial revolution, are creating a whole new environment for mankind and a whole new way of life ... [They] deal with the very core of human society - with information and its communication and use."

A direct predecessor, and perhaps even a prophet of the later microcomputing revolution, Diebold's career reflects a constant theme in American economic history: an eagerness to harness the latest technologies for practical, beneficial purposes.

Source: U.S. Department of State

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