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I agree on that. The 1880 cencus was barely finished counting while the 1890 was being conducted. The card reader with its simple programmed feature wouldn't run your cell phone, but it was revolutionary in its time and a base.
This was a true use of the tools as a computing machine. But long before, at the beginnings of the mechanised textile industry those card controls were developed. It wasn't quite a computer but it revolutionized its time as fully as the computer has its own. It made it possible to build a large factory, instead of small mills or a cottage industry. This virtually altered the landscape and society. It is on these early control cards, the first to make gloves, going back to the true cottage small machines use in cottages, that the first brick was laid.
When you sit at your computer wearing your cotten jeans and t shirt, you owe as much to the technology which guided the machine which wove the fabric as you do to Apple or Google or the clear icons. It's where it started.
And with trek, if you had a flip phone, you had the successor to the communicator of origional trek. The man who built the first commercial mobile phone had gone for a run on the beach, and missed several really important calls. There were mobile phones, but they were very large and with little range. He wished for a communicator so he could take beach runs guilt free and built his mobile phone based on the flip style of trek.
I remember when it was a neat idea that we could have communicators and its sometimes strange to think of how we essencially do today.
I agree that technology builds on it self and has been doing that since we could first speak about 10,000 years ago. As soon as we could speak we started advancing exponentially as well and that is why things are really advancing fast today. However when you look at computers the computer built in 1890 is considered to be the first modern computer and that is why I regarded that as the start of the computer revaluation.
That is regarded as when the first modern computer was invited for the 1890 census. So that is when I think the computer revaluation began. Since then they have been advancing exponentially and becoming a bigger part of our lives.
This is a article that goes into detail about the first modern computer. You can see that in its day it was so important that the Scientific American made it a cover story.
I was looking at the picture on the American Scientific and was wondering what it must have been like for the people working on the 1890 census. Using a "computer" that could do the kind of work it did yet they still had horse and buggy's, essentially still living in the old world. If I could go back in time it would be fun to talk to them just to see what they thought of the new technology and what it would do to society.
One of the people pictured in the article (on panel #6) is a fellow named Henry Ross Perot, who founded a tech firm called Electronic Data Systems in 1962, at the age of 32. EDS had early success in the mid-1960's when it was invited to develop electronic filing systems for the new Medicare program, which would have been a logistical nightmare using only systems such as punchcards, paper files/tub files, or 1950's computer storage systems like the IBM 305 RAMAC . The RAMAC - introduced in 1956- was a vacuum tube computer which stored 5 MB of data in each of its gigantic storage disc towers. Here's a photo of one from Wikipedia:
I believe it is a picture of a Drum Storage Device. They were spining drums that had a magnetic coating on them and heads that hovered of the surface. The heads read and wrote data. You could screw up the head adjustment and score the drum (turn the head into the drum) so they came with additional heads just in case. As an example a 16 bit machine would come with 18 heads just in case. Some drum devices were bigger then a 50 gal drum.
I heard somewhere the size of the punch card was based upon the size of the previous US Currency (dollar bills) size. The boxes that held those old dollars became available and the cards were size designed to fit in all these excess boxes.
My dad was a civil engineer in the 50's & 60's and told me that he had a serious computer addiction back then. The main difference in, say 2000, was that that the user interface had improved by leaps and bounds. Editors, GUI, interactive vs. batch, etc. But that is just like saying that a 1960 Caddilac with 300 HP didn't have the plush heated seats of a 2013 Caddy CTS with 270 HP. A refinement, but not a quantum leap.
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