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From punched cards to electromechanical machines - a look inside the IBM museum charting the rise of the company and computing.
IBM's history stretches back more than 100 years, during which time it has helped forge the modern information age.
The firm's museum at its UK base in Hursley, near Winchester, charts the storied timeline of the company, right back to its early electromechanical machines that read and stored data on punched cards.
Punched card tabulating machines were invented in the late 19th century as a way of collating census data on the fast-growing US population, which had passed 60 million at the time.
The machine was devised by Herman Hollerith, a man who would go on to found one of the companies that merged to form the Computing-Tabulating Recording Company in 1911, later renamed IBM.
The Hollerith tabulating machine was able to automatically transcribe and tabulate - arrange in tables - census data using a punched card system.
To use the system, a card would be punched with holes, with each hole corresponding to a particular characteristic the census office wanted to record, such as gender or age.
To read the census data off each punched card, the operator would place each card inside a press attached to Hollerith's machine. Inside each press were electrified pins that pushed against the card - if the pin passed through a hole in the card it completed a circuit and advanced a mechanical dial that recorded an instance of a particular characteristic. Early machines could process cards punched with 40 holes, allowing each press to count some 40 characteristics at a time. When the machine had finished processing the cards, an operator would read numbers off dials on the front of the machine and record the final tally of all the characteristics the machine had counted.
Throughout the early days of computing, from 1950s through the 1970s, punched cards were the primary way corporations and governments stored and accessed information.
This is the IBM 26 card punch, a programmable punch used to record information on punched cards.
Caption by: Nick Heath
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