Marvels

Description

From Publishers Weekly For J(esse) D(insmore) Marvel, who runs away from a hardscrabble farm in 1908 to hawk parlor organs in the Midwest, then to sell cash registers and tabulators, and eventually to found a data-processing company, read "Tom Watson"; for his megacorporation Marvel Scientific Machines, read "IBM." In his seventh novel ( The Seven of Swords, Harrington, a quondam computer systems engineer, spans the generations from go-getting salesmen in the 1900s to the international moguls of the 1970s. He describes the evolution of the cash register from the first models that reconciled sales and receipts to the nearly perfected machine that thinks. Readers who like Arthur Hailey's novels about industry will enjoy this informative, if doggedly pedestrian, story. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more