Trends in Terminology: From Punched Cards to Digital Informing

Us Business Starts Computerization

The development of counting machines began during the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century. After this, at the beginning of the 20^th century, machine calculations developed along two distinct paths.

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  Handheld arithmometers and bookkeeping machines,

Figure 1.

The 19^th century Odhner arithmometer was in use almost up into the present, as was the bookkeeping machine (Photos: public domain)

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  Punched cards machines for mass census mechanization (used first in 1890 in the US) and for large volumes of business data, a market which, since 1924, has been dominated by IBM.

Figure 2.

IBM tabulator, which was reading punched cards, calculating transactions, and printing reports (Photo: public domain)

As a result of the Great Depression (1929-39), the Social Security Act was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14^th, 1935, to create a social insurance. Social security numbers were created and provided for each resident in the US. This act triggered the broad application of IBM punch-card machines.

Figure 3.

These cables are an external program that controlled computing in the first electronic computer ENIAC (1946); this is the same way that IBM punched-card machines were programmed. (Photo: public domain)

During this period, the term punched card systems was the dominate terminology. This technique introduced the term programming, which was initially done on external boards where cables connected the instructions. However, this programming system was also used on an electronic computer, ENIAC (1946). Soon, punched card machines were replaced by computers, such as IBM 1400 (where the data was still on punched cards). The Americans called this EDP (Electronic Data Processing) or ADP (Automatic Data Processing). From this point on in the United States began the popular term data processing.

Figure 4.

Beginning in the 1960s, the IBM 1400 computer series intensified the application of the terms EDP and ADP. (Photo: IBM brochure)

The United State Switches From Punch Cards To Computer Science

The term “computer science” appears in a 1959 article in the journal Communications of the ACM, in which Louis Fein (1959) argues for the creation of a Graduate School in Computer Sciences analogous to the Harvard Business School (established in 1908). He defended the name by saying that, like management science, the subject is applied and interdisciplinary, while having the characteristics typical of an academic discipline. Perhaps mainly due to the broad application of computers in data processing for businesses and government in the 1960s, computer science came into its own as a discipline. The first computer science department in the US was formed at Purdue University in 1962.¹ The first person to receive a Ph. D. from a computer science department was Richard Wexelblat at the University of Pennsylvania in December 1965.

Computer science deals with the theory of computation, algorithms, computational problems, and the design of hardware, software, and applications for computer systems. A complete definition of computer science is provided Peter J. Denning in the article “Computer Science: The Discipline” (in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science).