Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945

At a time when Internet use is closely tracked and social networking sites supply data for targeted advertising, Lars Heide presents the first academic study of the invention that fueled today’s information revolution: the punched card. Early punched cards helped to process the United States census in 1890. They soon proved useful in calculating invoices and issuing pay slips. As demand for more sophisticated systems and reading machines increased in both the United States and Europe, punched cards served ever-larger data-processing purposes. Insurance companies, public utilities, businesses, and governments all used them to keep detailed records of their customers, competitors, employees, citizens, and enemies. The United States used punched-card registers in the late 1930s to pay roughly 21 million Americans their Social Security pensions, Vichy France used similar technologies in an attempt to mobilize an army against the occupying German forces, and the Germans in 1941 developed several punched-card registers to make the war effort—and surveillance of minorities—more effective. Heide’s analysis of these three major punched-card systems, as well as the impact of the invention on Great Britain, illustrates how different cultures collected personal and financial data and how they adapted to new technologies.This comparative study will interest students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including the history of technology, computer science, business history, and management and organizational studies

Co-evolution of information processing technology and use : interaction between the life insurance and tabulating industries

Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-56).Supported by the Center for Coordination Science, the MIT Sloan School of Management.JoAnne Yates

Alle origini dell'informatizzazione : Herman Hollerith e i sistemi per l'analisi e il reperimento dei dati.

The purpose of this paper is to study and give the perception of the relatively slow progress and spread of computerization and the first information retrieval system between the 1860 and the II world war end. Starting from Herman Hollerith, the statistician who, working at the U.S. census, has invented the first punched card coding of data and the electro-mechanical system to read and compute these data, the Electric Tabulating Machine; the paper considers and continues with the hand managed information retrieval systems based on different type of punched cards, like the edge notched punched cards as the Cope-Chat or McBee cards, the Zatocards of Calvin N. Mooers, the peek-a-boo cards invented by William E. Batten, up to the Uniterm cards system of Mortimer Taube

Evolving information use in firms, 1850-1920 : ideology and information techniques and technologies

Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-35).JoAnne Yates

Emergence of mechanical accounting in the U.S., 1880-1930

For centuries, accounting was a manual process. Starting in the late 1800s, a series of technological innovations emerged that not only changed the way the accounting process was conducted but dramatically changed the workplace, the workforce, the information provided, and the accounting profession itself. By 1930, most major US companies had adopted mechanical accounting as a more efficient way of processing accounting information. This paper examines the historical development and influence of mechanical accounting in the U.S. from 1880 to 1930

The ingenuity of common workmen: and the invention of the computer

Since World War II, state support for scientific research has been assumed crucial to technological and economic progress. Governments accordingly spent tremendous sums to that end. Nothing epitomizes the alleged fruits of that involvement better than the electronic digital computer. The first such computer has been widely reputed to be the ENIAC, financed by the U.S. Army for the war but finished afterwards. Vastly improved computers followed, initially paid for in good share by the Federal Government of the United States, but with the private sector then dominating, both in development and use, and computers are of major significance.;Despite the supposed success of public-supported science, evidence is that computers would have evolved much the same without it but at less expense. Indeed, the foundations of modern computer theory and technology were articulated before World War II, both as a tool of applied mathematics and for information processing, and the computer was itself on the cusp of reality. Contrary to popular understanding, the ENIAC actually represented a movement backwards and a dead end.;Rather, modern computation derived more directly, for example, from the prewar work of John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a physics professor and graduate student, respectively, at Iowa State College (now University) in Ames, Iowa. They built the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC), which, although special purpose and inexpensive, heralded the efficient and elegant design of modern computers. Moreover, while no one foresaw commercialization of computers based on the ungainly and costly ENIAC, the commercial possibilities of the ABC were immediately evident, although unrealized due to war. Evidence indicates, furthermore, that the private sector was willing and able to develop computers beyond the ABC and could have done so more effectively than government, to the most sophisticated machines.;A full and inclusive history of computers suggests that Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, had it right. He believed that minimal and aloof government best served society, and that the inherent genius of citizens was itself enough to ensure the general prosperity