It Began with Babbage (8 page)

Leibniz's theme, as I called it, may have been meant for mathematical computation; his “excellent men” referred to astronomers and mathematicians. His theme, however, echoed by Babbage, also became Hollerith's theme: to automate computation—not the kind of computation Leibniz and Babbage had in mind, involving transmutations of complex mathematical functions into sequences of machine operations, but computation nonetheless: sorting, counting, tallying, and organizing large volumes of data. To Hollerith, automatic computation meant automatic data processing. We might say that if Babbage initiated the realm of automatic scientific computing, Hollerith commenced the realm of automatic commercial or business computing, and the latter responded to a particular need. Hollerith's major intellectual achievement was to invent “an electric tabulating system,” which also gave him a doctoral degree from Columbia University.

Tabulation entails printing a summary obtained by counting. Electromechanical machines that did this came to be called tabulators or, sometimes, accounting machines.
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A well-known example was the IBM 407 Accounting Machine. In fact, Hollerith invented not just a single machine but a
system
comprising machines and a
process
that would be carried out by the system. His electric tabulating system involved a device called a keyboard punch, a tabulator, and a device that he called a sorting box (a distant forerunner to the later automatic sorter). Curiously, the printing of tabulated data was done by hand in Hollerith's system—a situation that would be improved in later developments by others—to include an automatic printer as part of the system.
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What was processed was data transcribed onto punched cards.

In Hollerith's hands, the original Jacquard card (or its Babbageian version) became something entirely different. His cards were 3 inches by 5.5 inches,
¹³
and each card held relevant information about an individual. Hollerith described, as an example, the format of the card used by the U.S. Surgeon-General for compiling U.S. Army health statistics.
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Each card represented an individual soldier. The card's surface was partitioned into several sections (or “fields”, to use a later term), each devoted to particular, relevant aspects. Each field, in turn, consisted of an array of subfields, with numbers or abbreviated codes assigned to the subfields. One field was given, for instance, to the division to which the soldier was assigned, and the subfields corresponded to the various divisions. A hole punched in one of the subfields would indicate the soldier's division.

Thus, a single Hollerith card became a memory device that held data that, in a manner of speaking, defined the “identity” of that individual (from the Army's perspective, that is). It held a record about a person, such as rank, the branch of the armed services, age, race, nationality, and length of service.
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To paraphrase a comment by a character in Don DeLillo's novel
White Noise
(put in an altogether different context), one is the sum total of one's data.
¹⁶

The system was completely general—universal in the same sense that the Jacquard card (in the realm of weaving) and the Babbage card (in the realm of mathematical computing) were universal. By changing the format design a different card would obtain, as was used by New York City's Board of Health to compile mortality statistics
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and, of course, a different format design would be used to compile statistics in the 11th U.S. Census of 1890, in which Hollerith's system played a central role.

His system can be depicted by a system diagram, as shown in
Figure 3.1
. From the census returns documents, a keyboard punch transcribes the information for each individual onto a card. The cards are then placed, one by one, on a part of the tabulating machine Hollerith called “the press”, which has sensors that read the data by sensing the holes, and send electrical signals to the other main component of the tabulator comprising mechanical counters in the form of dials. Specific counters are wired through circuits to the sensors that read specific fields in the card. For example, one counter could be connected to the sensors in the press so that it counted the number of males in a district,
whereas another, the number of females. This is done manually by establishing the electrical connections between sensors and counters. If some combination of fields are to be compiled, for instance the number of white males and females, respectively, additional circuits are established manually that connect sensors for the fields “male” and “white” to a separate counter.

The cards may need to be sorted in some order or separated into stacks according to some particular field or combination of fields. In the case of census processing, for example, they may have to be separated and/or ordered by district so that statistics for each district can be compiled. The sorting box is used for this purpose. It consists of a box divided into compartments, each of which is closed by a lid that springs open when an electromagnetic circuit is closed. The lids of the sorting box are connected to the press component of the tabulator in the same way as the counters. When a particular district number is read by the appropriate sensor in the press, the lid wired to that sensor springs open. The card is then deposited manually in the opened compartment, the lid is closed manually, and the next card is read. If a different district number is now read, a different lid opens, and so on.

In present-centered language, Hollerith's tabulating system was a human–machine system. Human intervention was necessary to transcribe the data onto punched cards; to feed the cards one by one into the press part of the tabulator; to set up the connections between sensors and counters, and between sensors and the compartment lids in the sorting box; to transfer cards from the tabulator to the sorting box; and to print out the values held in the counters. However, the time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone task of actually tallying and compiling information was automated.

Hollerith was not content in being “just” an inventor. Like his great contemporary and compatriot Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), he was also an entrepreneur, and in this capacity he enters into the corporate history of the computer.

In 1896, Hollerith left government service to found his own company, the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1911, this firm merged with two others to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), of which a certain Thomas J. Watson (1874–1956) became head in 1914. Watson changed the name of the company's Canadian subsidiary to International Business Machines (IBM) in 1917; the parent company, CTR itself, became IBM in 1924, with more than 300,000 employees.
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In 1920, CTR formed a British subsidiary named British Tabulating Machine (BTM), which parted ways from IBM in 1947 and, after merging with another company, became International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). In 1968, ICT merged with English Electric Computers and became International Computers Limited (ICL), a firm that no longer exists, having been acquired by Fujitsu in 2002.

Punched-card electromechanical data processing is part of the fossil record that unveils a part of what I am calling
missing links
in the evolutionary history, the phylogeny, of computing—links that connect Babbage's mechanical world to the age of digital electronics. Throughout the course of the first four decades of the 20th century, led by IBM—the undisputed leader in this technology—a whole range of electromechanical machines were designed that refined, improved, enlarged, and automated further the process of data processing. The objective, always, was to improve automation in terms of extent of automation (and thus minimizing human intervention) and speed of processing.

The punched card itself—at the heart of data processing systems—would change quite radically from Hollerith's original card. It would be standardized in size (7 1/8 inches by 3 1/4 inches), thickness, and format: 12 rows spaced one-quarter inch apart with 80 columns. Alphabetic, numeric, and special characters were represented by specific combinations of holes down a column, according to what is known as “extended binary-coded decimal interchange code”.

The basic data processing functions would evolve, and machines to perform these functions came into being, including a typewriterlike device, the
keypunch
to punch cards; a similar device called the
verifier
to verify the correctness and accuracy of the transcribed punched cards; the
automatic punch
to reproduce or copy a deck of punched cards; the
sorter
to arrange a deck of cards automatically according to some hierarchy (such as in alphabetic sequence of names or in numeric sequence of dates of birth); the
collator
, which merged two previously sorted decks of cards into one larger sorted deck; the
tabulator
, with varying degrees of functional sophistication; the
calculator
, which read data from input cards (such as the number of hours one employee worked in a pay period and his hourly rate) and performed numeric calculations (such as gross pay, tax, benefit deduction, net pay), then punched the results onto cards; and the
printer
.

Machines such as tabulators, calculators, and collators were
programmable
in that, by changing the wiring connections on the control panel or “plugboard,” they could be made to read different fields on a card and to perform variations on their central functions. After a plugboard was wired a certain way, it constituted a “program” that could be used repeatedly, or that plugboard could be exchanged for a differently wired plugboard.

In the world of punched-card data processing, each type of machine performed a specialized function, but no one machine type really had an “identity” of its own. One would not purchase a sorter by itself, nor a keypunch, nor a tabulator, not even a calculator. Each was in symbiotic relation with the others; they “fed” off one another. They formed a system. A
data processing center
(such as IBM had) would have an army of keypunches
and verifiers, some automatic punches, some printers, a few sorters, one or two tabulators, and one or two calculating machines—a factory, in other words, in which some of the machines worked in parallel, some in sequence, and some in “pipeline” mode. But what was being processed, what flowed from one machine to another, were not the punched cards—they were only the medium—but data or information or
symbol structures
carried in the punched cards. Data processing factories or centers were
symbol
processing systems.

These systems unveiled a fundamental character of symbol processing: numbers are only one kind of symbol. Insofar as machines such as Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine were concerned with numbers and arithmetic operations, they were calculating machines, as Babbage readily admitted, but the punched-card data processing system that Hollerith pioneered entailed much more than calculation. It performed operations such as comparing, matching, sorting, merging, and copying. These operations did not alter the symbol structures they were processing. Indeed, these operations were indifferent to the symbols themselves as signifying anything out there in the world. Their only concern was the
relationship
among the symbols, such as whether 3 was higher than A (in some sense). In other words, the punched-card data processing paradigm revealed that
computing and calculating are not synonymous
. In concrete terms, the calculating machine and the tabulator were not the only machines that mattered.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Babbage had not been forgotten. At least one person, an Irishman named Percy Ludgate (1883–1922), was much aware of him.
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Writing in 1909 on the design of an analytical machine capable of performing calculations without human intervention, he recalled, in admiration, Babbage's work.
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What little we know about Ludgate is largely a result of British computer scientist and computer historian Brian Randell, who composed a brief biography of this man.
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Born in County Cork, Ireland, Ludgate studied accountancy at Rathmere College of Commerce in Dublin, passed his final examination with distinction, and was awarded a gold medal by the Corporation of Accountancy. His deplorably short working life was spent as an auditor with a Dublin firm, and so his work on the analytical machine was almost certainly done in his spare time in the privacy of his home. He appeared to be an unassuming person; he was described by some who knew him as modest, gentle, courteous, and humble,
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although his intellectual abilities were evident to colleagues and he was even regarded as possessing a touch of genius.
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