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The Rhodesia Herald,

February 19, 1971

COMPUTERS may be time savers but they are certainly not infallible, as members of the University of Rhodesia pension scheme have just discovered.

The University recently received from an insurance company a list of pension scheme policies showing the accumulated bonuses and the value of the policies on maturity.

But in many cases the maturity values appeared to be suspect. It turned out that several were more than eight times the sum insured. Even with accumulated bonuses this seemed too good to be true.

The University bursar, Mr W. Burness, said yesterday the suspect maturity values had been checked and the company was now issuing correct statements.

The computer, meanwhile, has been fed a memo asking for accuracy.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

Computers are useful tools that make it lighter to carry out a lot of tasks but they are just as good as good as the instructions and information that people input into them.

When the technology was gaining popularity, a popular saying was coined: “garbage in, garbage out (GIGO),” meaning that “in any system, the quality of output is a determined by the quality of the input.”

The results that users get are only as good as the correctness, completeness, and logic of the instructions of the data input.

It is always essential to check all information especially when something seems to be too good to be true.