In 18th and 19th Century America - the US constitution mandated that a census should be taken of all US citizens every 10 years - this is neede in order to determine state representation in Congress.
The first census of 1790 only took 9 months to complete. However by 1880 the US population has grown - it took 7.5 years for that census to be completed.
The census bureau offered a prize to anyone that can automate the count for the 1890 census. An inventor named Herman Hollerith won that prize.
Hollerith adopted Jacquard's punched cards for the computation.
Known as the Hollerith Desk - it consisted of a card reader, a gear for counting and a dialed wall indicators to display the results
Hollerith had the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called a read/write technology. Unknown to Hollerith - Babbage already proposed this concept long time ago.
Hollerith's invention worked. The 1890 census only took 3 years to complete and saved $ 5 million dollars (the start of venture capitalism - here is were the real fun begins)
Because of his invention, Hollerith built a company called the "Tabulating Machine Company". After a few buyouts - it eventually became "International Business Machines" or as it is more commonly known today as "IBM"[1]
See figure below of Hollerith’s Desk:
IBM built mechanical calculators and sold them to businesses to help in accounting and inventory in the private sector. This calculators only did adding and subtracting - no divisions or multiplications.
However the US Government - more specifically, the US military needed a calculator that can perform scientific computation.
In World War II - US battleships needed a way to determine the trajectory of a shell projectile once it is fired out of a cannon - this is needed for proper aiming. In the beginning, physicists and mathematicians had to manually compute for the atmospheric drag, wind direction, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc. - (equivalent to a manual labor for the brain) and put all these information in a manual called "Firing Tables" - published for gunnery manuals. It was a laborious pain staking task and there were not enough people to do it.
So in 1944 the Harvard Mark I computer was built. The Mark I was a joint partnership between Harvard and IBM to provide a solution for firing tables. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the US. However, the Mark I was not a pure electronic computer. It was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor.[2]
The Mark I incorporated paper tape machines for programming the computer. This is far better than the old stack of punch cards that IBM was using for their mechanical calculators.
See Figure below of: The Harvard Mark I: an electro-mechanical computer
See figure below of the The first computer bug [photo © 2002 IEEE]
Invention of the first High Level programming language
In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable by humans than is the binary language understood by the computing machinery. A high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler. Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the Navy Reserves until she was 79 (another record). [3]
[1] An Illustrated History of Computers; http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt3.htm
The figure below is one of the four paper tape readers on the Harvard Mark I (you can observe the punched paper roll emerging from the bottom):
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