In computer news this week:

The only Chad I ever heard of was a singer in the 60's .... or - when you hear the news explaining that a chad is related to a punch card and you think that punch cards sound old fashioned - here's just how old fashioned they are:

(From my )

History of the Microcomputer Revolution - Part 1 -

In the early 1800's a French inventor named Jacquard revolutionized the weaving industry by creating a loom which could create extremely complicated designs by reading instructions which were punched onto cards. The holes punched into the cards - which were strung together into a chain of continuous instructions - directed the loom which threads to use and what to do.

In the mid 1800's a British inventor named Charles Babbage came up with the idea of an Analytical Engine which would do mathematical computations using this same concept of storing instructions onto cards, but he lacked the technology to create the powerful engine needed.

A contemporary of his, a woman named Augusta Ada Byron, who was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was a gifted mathematician who immediately understood the concepts and the possibilities of Babbage's analytical engine. She was able to expand this concept into actual theoretical steps and procedures which would be used in the computations, and she is credited by some as the first computer programmer.

In the late 1800's an American inventor named Herman Hollerith invented a punchcard counting device which was used successfully for tabulating statistics in taking the 1890 census. Hollerith's business eventually ran into financial difficulties and he was forced to sell out to a company named CTR, which stood for Computer Tabulating Recording.

A young salesman at CTR named Tom Watson had started off his career selling pianos off the back of a horse-drawn cart. Now Watson had worked his way up through corporate America - spending time at the National Cash Register Company along the way - and he recognized the potential of selling punchcard-based calculating machines to American business. Watson would later take over this company himself and in the 1920's rename it the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM.

Modern day mainframe computers as we know them were created by the United States Military's need to calculate such things as shell trajectories in a minimal amount of time. The electronic vacuum tube ENIAC computer, operational in 1945, was a thousand times faster than the older electro-mechanical calculating machines previously used for such tasks.

The ENIAC inventors went on to form the Univac corporation, a name which became synonymous with computers, until the late 1950's when IBM fought back and regained the industry with its IBM 360 mainframe.

.......

As a historic note I'll point out that that these early mainframe computers used batch processing, with programs inputted into them via punch cards.

And now amazingly - almost unbelievably - in the year 2000 we find the punch card system still in use in our election process; working obviously to some degree, except of course, in Florida.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@aol.com