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    Where Our Story Begins: (A Computer History)

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    Mae
    Herman Hollerith developed the punched card system in the 1890s for the U.S. Census Bureau to sort, retrieve, count, and perform simple calculations on data punched onto cards, founding the Tabulating Machine Company which later became IBM. Mechanical calculators that could perform basic arithmetic also emerged in the 1890s and were used by businesses and in science. These electromechanical machines provided increased productivity for business and science through the 1930s and were predecessors to modern computers. The computer emerged in the late 1940s, differing in that it was programmable and operated at electronic speeds, combining calculation, storage, programmability, and high speeds.

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    Where Our Story Begins: (A Computer History)

    Uploaded by

    Mae
    29 views2 pages
    Herman Hollerith developed the punched card system in the 1890s for the U.S. Census Bureau to sort, retrieve, count, and perform simple calculations on data punched onto cards, founding the Tabulating Machine Company which later became IBM. Mechanical calculators that could perform basic arithmetic also emerged in the 1890s and were used by businesses and in science. These electromechanical machines provided increased productivity for business and science through the 1930s and were predecessors to modern computers. The computer emerged in the late 1940s, differing in that it was programmable and operated at electronic speeds, combining calculation, storage, programmability, and high speeds.

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    Herman Hollerith developed the punched card system in the 1890s for the U.S. Census Bureau to sort, retrieve, count, and perform simple calculations on data punched onto cards, founding the Tabulating Machine Company which later became IBM. Mechanical calculators that could perform basic arithmetic also emerged in the 1890s and were used by businesses and in science. These electromechanical machines provided increased productivity for business and science through the 1930s and were predecessors to modern computers. The computer emerged in the late 1940s, differing in that it was programmable and operated at electronic speeds, combining calculation, storage, programmability, and high speeds.

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    29 views2 pages

    Where Our Story Begins: (A Computer History)

    Uploaded by

    Mae
    Herman Hollerith developed the punched card system in the 1890s for the U.S. Census Bureau to sort, retrieve, count, and perform simple calculations on data punched onto cards, founding the Tabulating Machine Company which later became IBM. Mechanical calculators that could perform basic arithmetic also emerged in the 1890s and were used by businesses and in science. These electromechanical machines provided increased productivity for business and science through the 1930s and were predecessors to modern computers. The computer emerged in the late 1940s, differing in that it was programmable and operated at electronic speeds, combining calculation, storage, programmability, and high speeds.

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    (A COMPUTER HISTORY)

    Where Our Story Begins


    The word computer implies a machine that not only calculates but also takes over the drudgery of its
    sister activity, the storage and retrieval of data. Thus a more appropriate place to start the story would
    be the 1890s, when the American inventor Herman Hollerith developed, for the U.S. Census Bureau, the
    punched card and a suite of machines that used cards to sort, retrieve, count, and perform simple
    calculations on data punched onto cards. The inherent flexibility of the system he invented led to many
    applications beyond that of the Census. Hollerith founded a company in 1896 called the Tabulating
    Machine Company to market his invention. It was combined with other companies in 1911 to form a
    company called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, and in 1924 the new head of C-T-R,
    Thomas J. Watson, changed the name to the International Business Machines Corporation, todays IBM.
    Businesses in the United States and around the world used punched card equipment, supplied by IBM
    and its competitors (especially Remington Rand), through the 20th century, with the punched card dying
    out only in the 1980s.

    As punched card equipment was being marketed, other inventors were developing mechanical
    calculators that performed the basic functions of arithmetic. The Felt Comptometer, also invented in
    the 1890s, could only add, but a skilled operator could calculate at very high speeds with it, and it found
    applications primarily in the businesses and accounting fields. Other, more complex and costly machines
    could multiply and even divide, and these found use in engineering and science, especially astronomy. In
    the 1920s and 1930s, observatories and government research laboratories hired teams of clerks, often
    women, to use these machines to reduce experimental data. (The clerks were called computers, a
    name that was transferred to the electronic machine when it was invented in the 1940s, precisely to
    replace the work they were doing.)

    These electromechanical machines, installed in ensembles and operated by skilled teams of people,
    provided a great increase in productivity for business, engineering, and science through the 1930s. They
    laid the foundation for the invention of the computer that followed. Many of the U.S. companies that
    supplied commercial computers in the 1950s, including IBM, Burroughs, and Remington Rand, were
    among the principal suppliers of punched card equipment and mechanical calculators in the 1930s and
    1940s.

    But the computer as it emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s was more than just an extension of
    these machines. The first major difference was that a computer was programmable: not only could it do
    calculations or store data, it could also perform sequences of operations, which themselves could be
    modified based on the outcome of an earlier calculation. In the pre-computer era, that was done by
    human beings who might, for example, carry decks of cards from one punched card device to another,
    or by the calculator operator performing one calculation if a result was positive, another if negative, and
    so on. The second major difference was that the computer, as it has come to be defined, operates at
    electronic speeds: orders of magnitude faster than the electromechanical devices of the pre-World-War-
    II era. Only when those qualitiescalculation, storage, programmability, and high speedswere
    combined did one have a true computer, and only then can the computer age be said to have arrived.

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