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

Structuring information work: Ferranti and Martins Bank, 1952-1968

The adoption of large-scale computers by the British retail banks in the 1960s required a first-time dislocation of customer accounting from its confines in the branches, where it had been dealt with by paper-based and mechanized information systems, to a new collective space: the bank computer center. While historians have rightly stressed the continuities between centralized office work, punched-card tabulation and computerization, the shift from decentralized to centralized information work by means of a computer has received little attention. In this article, I examine the case of Ferranti and Martins Bank and employ elements of Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to highlight the difficulties of transposing old information practices directly onto new computerized information work

Enseñanza de programación en el Politécnico Grancolombiano. Situación actual y aplicación de TIC como alternativa de mejora

La enseñanza de programación resulta central en los procesos de formación de los programas relacionados con las ciencias de la computación, la ingeniería de sistemas y la ingeniería de software. La formación en esta área particular del conocimiento en dichos programas tiene una particular importancia, porque de su éxito depende buena parte del desempeño académico de los estudiantes en asignaturas futuras del programa. Sin embargo, durante los últimos 20 años, la mayor parte de los procesos educativos han mantenido el mismo enfoque con resultados mezclados. En este trabajo se presenta una breve reseña de los enfoques tanto conceptuales como metodológicos aplicados históricamente, y se contextualiza la situación presente en el Politécnico Grancolombiano en torno a la formación en programación con énfasis en las dificultades actuales; y se presenta una alternativa de aplicación de TIC bajo la forma de una herramienta de software para la enseñanza de conceptos básicos de programación que puede facilitar los procesos de enseñanza – aprendizaje en las asignaturas asociadas

Divergent Paths to a Network World. An Approach to the IT from Savings Banks Industry

This study provides information on how the process of technological globalization was implemented prior to the Internet and what its limits were, which certainly helps to understand how computers are changing the world. One can see divergent patterns in the process of introducing computers (using the worldwide savings bank industry as a reference). However, the foundations of this divergence should be situated within an idiosyncratic and not an asymmetric landscape as a consequence of the role that adoption/appropriation processes (the end-user as an active participant) play in the perspective of technological diffusion

Divergent Paths to a Network World. An Approach to the IT from Savings Banks Industry

This study provides information on how the process of technological globalization was implemented prior to the Internet and what its limits were, which certainly helps to understand how computers are changing the world. One can see divergent patterns in the process of introducing computers (using the worldwide savings bank industry as a reference). However, the foundations of this divergence should be situated within an idiosyncratic and not an asymmetric landscape as a consequence of the role that adoption/appropriation processes (the end-user as an active participant) play in the perspective of technological diffusion

Into a Wild New Yonder: the United States Air Force and the Origins of Its Information Age

The United States Air Force is an organization operationally focused on gathering, processing, and utilizing vast quantities of information, so much so that it added cyberspace to its core missions of air and space in 2005. Service leaders have argued that a USAF information revolution - its entrance into the Information Age - began as early as the first computers in the 1940s or as late as the proliferation of networks in the 1990s. Upon close inspection, however, it becomes clear that such assertions overlook decades of information operations and management, and overemphasize the concept of a single information age. This dissertation illustrates how the Air Force\u27s information age has origins dating back to the Civil War-era, a half-century before the development of the first air service. Through reviewing methodological and technological changes in information operations, it becomes clear that the post-World War II information age grew from numerous early service efforts to improve the quality, quantity and delivery of its information

A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding

Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyaways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nevertheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a citizen-science project that generates Big Data can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists

The Arc of Monopoly: A Case Study in Computing

The world we live in today is defined by three great arcs. The first is the world of semiconductors and the innovation characterized by Moore’s law, the second is the creation of ubiquitous wireless access, and the third is the emergence of the internet platform. In that context, this Essay looks at government claims of monopolization in telecommunications and computing by considering past antitrust actions against AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft. Early antitrust actions against AT&T and IBM of course long predated the rise of the Chicago School, but later actions against AT&T and IBM overlapped that rise as did the antitrust actions against Microsoft. These antitrust actions intersected with and influenced these three arcs, though teasing out the precise nature of that influence is ultimately quite trick

Period, Theme, Event: Locating Information History in History

Explores 'information history', or the study of information and its practices, as a way to arrange investigations of past and present. An invited contribution for the volume, "Information and Power in History: Towards a Global Approach," edited by Ida Nijenhuis, Marijke van Faassen, Joris Gijsenbergh, Wim de Jong, and Ronald Sluijter (London: Routledge, forthcoming). A submitted manuscript under review