Pratyatoṣa: Do you think someday we could use that machine?
Prabhupāda: I do not know, but I have got experience Tanberg is very nice.
Pratyatoṣa: Yeah, they're very reliable. They're reliable machines. And also, my job is computer programming, and I think that computers could be used.
Prabhupāda: Computer?
Pratyatoṣa: Yeah, they could be used in many, many ways in the Society. Like one... I think the most important use it could be put to is for helping in transcribing and editing and composing. A computer can do composing automatically.
Prabhupāda: Automatically?
Pratyatoṣa: Sure. It's all automatic, because it's actually just a mechanical process, just getting the lines to come out even at the end and everything.
Prabhupāda: You can learn that?
Devotee (4): I already know computer programming, Prabhupāda.
Prabhupāda: Oh.
Devotee (4): I learned it in high school, and I was working as a programmer.
Prabhupāda: Then why not take a computer?
Pratyatoṣa: Sure. And we can get a terminal. You can buy a computer terminal for about $600.
Devotee (4): Oh, really?
Pratyatoṣa: And for $185 a month, we could have forty hours a week of computer time, eight hours a day. And they have courses, this company gives computerized courses that'll teach children how to read and how to do arithmetic through the terminal. And also, it has a fantastic editor. If you type in the text, and any mistakes you make, you can just type in a few instructions with a computer and it'll change them. Then after you get all the text the way you want it, it's stored on a magnetic disk at the computer. And then when you get it perfect—you can change it a hundred times if you want—but when you get it perfect, then you just have the computer automatically type out the whole thing.
Prabhupāda: You know how to do that?
Devotee (4): Yes, Prabhupāda, I got A's in that.
Pratyatoṣa: These terminals have paper tape punches. You can the punch paper tape and then feed the paper tape into a machine called a photon machine, and you get out a perfectly composed page with... You can have any type size you want, you can have any type of, what do you call it, the face, the typeface, and it'll be perfect for publishing. It'll come right out of that. The whole process is automatic.
Devotee (4): Those tapes can be kept, stored, all the tapes.
Pratyatoṣa: Sure, they can be kept stored. And then... Oh, also, you get free storage with this for 300,000 characters, that's about 100 pages at least.
Devotee (4): This is a wonderful idea, Śrīla Prabhupāda. I don't know why no one thought of this before.