advances were made in mathematical physics, and it came to be understood that most observable dynamic phenomena could be characterized by differential equations, so that ready means for their solution and for the solution of other problems of calculus would be helpful. Moreover, from a practical standpoint, the availability of steam power caused manufacturing, transportation, and commerce to thrive and led to a period of great engineering achievement. The designing of railroads and the construction of steamships, textile mills, and bridges required differential calculus to determine such quantities as centers of gravity, centers of buoyancy, moments of inertia, and stress distributions; even the evaluation of the power output of a steam engine required practical mathematical integration. A strong need thus developed for a machine that could rapidly perform many repetitive calculations. HollerithA step toward automated computation was the introduction of punched cards, which were first successfully used in connection with computing in 1890 by Herman Hollerith and James Powers, working for the U.S. Census Bureau. They developed devices that could automatically read the information that had been punched into cards, without human intermediation. Reading errors were consequently greatly reduced, workflow was increased, and, more important, stacks of punched cards could be used as an accessible memory store of almost unlimited capacity; furthermore, different problems could be stored on different batches of cards and worked on as needed.These advantages were noted by commercial interests and soon led to the development of improved punch-card business-machine systems by International Business Machines (IBM), Remington-Rand, Burroughs, and other corporations. These systems used electromechanical devices, in which electrical power provided mechanical motion such as for turning the wheels of an adding machine. Such systems soon included feature...
