ANCESTRAL BEGINNINGS
One of the direct ancestors of the computer
was the handsome
Hollerith census
machine,
which was designed
to solve a new kind of problem. In 1880, the
U.S. census had taken seven years to
produce 21,000 pages of data. There was a
real danger that the 1890 census might take
more than 10 years to count, which would
trigger a constitutional crisis because that
document requires an "actual enumeration"
every decade for allocating seats in the
House of Representatives. A young New York
engineer named Herman Hollerith won a three-
way competition for technology to save the
day by using "punched cards" to record and
then tabulate the data. It was a great
success, and 26,000 pages of data were
compiled in only 2 1/2 years.
But as a business, Hollerith's "Tabulating
Machine Corporation" had a less than stellar
business plan: they had only one product,
and one major customer that bought every 10
years. Hollerith gradually made the transition
to supplying general office machines based on
the same technology, and diversified the
product line by merging with a computing
scale company and a time clock company,
calling the result CTR ("Computing-Tabulating-
Recording") Company. Hollerith's health was
failing and he retired in 1911 with about a
million dollars, which was serious money in
those days.
It took a consummate salesman fired from
National Cash Register in 1911 to rename the
company "IBM" in 1924 and create the
dominant force in computers for many
decades. That salesman was
T.J. Watson,
Photo by Yosuf Karsh
and he and his son Tom Watson, Jr. ran the company for
an astounding 60 years between them.
IBM started before the invention of the
electronic computer. Its products were electro-
mechanical machines designed primarily for
office automation, based on Hollerith's
punched card. Here are machines used for
punching,
Photo by Michael Dubinsky
copying, and sorting,
Photo by Michael Dubinsky
the cards.
IBM's business model was brilliant: instead of
selling machines, they leased them and so
created a recurring revenue stream. And,
they sold the "razor" for your "shaver" as
well: in 1930 IBM sold 3 billion of those
punched paper cards, accounting for 10% of
their revenue and 35% of their profit.
The drive toward fast electronic computers
with no moving parts was natural and
unstoppable, but some people still enjoyed
tinkering with homebuilt computers made out
of more unusual technology. Here are three
examples, constructed as early as 1932, by
Prof. Derrick Lehmer at the University of
California at Berkeley. One is built from bicycle
chains and screws, one from industrial gears
and toothpicks, and one from 16mm film strips
and wooden bobbins.
Lehmer's Sieves,
Photo by Jessica Huynh
three very different
"computers," solve the same problem-finding
prime numbers using the Sieve of
Eratosthenes-and dramatically demonstrate
that an algorithm and the device that
executes it are very different indeed.
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