High-Technology Calculation in the Early 20th Century: Punched Card Machinery in Business and Government

Norberg, Arthur L.

doi:10.2307/3105906

Cited by 33 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…During the ‘data revolution’ of the 1940s and 1950s, organizations like the US military, the Federal Reserve Bank and the US Census Bureau produced millions and millions of punched cards each month in order to run their operations. If, hypothetically speaking, the US Census Bureau used 6 million punched cards only every other week, this would have produced 156 million punched cards in a single year (Klapper, 1957; Norberg, 1990). For documentation, these punched cards had to be stored in large warehouses, precursors to today’s data centres.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sacred Excess: Organizational Ignorance in an Age of Toxic Data

Schwarzkopf

2019

Organization Studies

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Actors in data-intensive industries at times deliberately induce and reproduce organizational ignorance by engaging in over-production of data. This observation leads the paper to make two claims. First, members of these industries fetishize data excess not in order to reduce, but in order to reproduce and stabilize organizational ignorance. Second, in this process of fetishization, organizational ignorance gives rise to forms of collective effervescence similar to that found in totemistic religions. This effervescence allows organizational actors to draw defining lines around that which is marked as awe-inspiring, dangerous and off-limits, namely the sacred. In reviewing organizational ignorance from the perspective of the sacred, this paper proposes that, paradoxically, contemporary forms of data creation allow companies and industries to organize themselves around ignorance as opposed to the promise of knowledge and insight. The paper uses this theoretical proposal in order to outline the contours of an alternative ontology of organizational ignorance, one that understands this phenomenon in terms of excessive presence of data and information.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sacred Excess: Organizational Ignorance in an Age of Toxic Data

Schwarzkopf

2019

Organization Studies

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“…Dirk de Wit 7 and Jan van den Ende 8 have examined the role of history, managerial ideologies, and organizational cultures in organizations using and adapting computer technology in the Netherlands. Others, such as Arthur L. Norberg,9 Martin CampbellKelly, 10 and James W. Cortada, 11 have examined the immediate predecessors of computing equipment in the office, punched card tabulators and other precomputer technologies, and the role of users in the shaping of technology and markets. My own work on the life insurance industry's influence on, and use of, tabulating technology in the first half of the 20th century-which forms the backdrop for this look at one set of insurance industry interactions with the computer industry in its earliest years-also falls into this category of work.…”

Section: And Kennethmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early interactions between the life insurance and computer industries: the Prudential's Edmund C. Berkeley

Yates¹

1997

IEEE Annals Hist. Comput.

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This paper studies how a representative of one commercial user industry, life insurance, interacted with key players in the newly forming computer industry after World War II but before any computers were sold for commercial purposes. In particular, it shows how Prudential's early computer expert and proselytizer, Edmund Callis Berkeley, viewed computer technology and its potential uses in life insurance, as well as the ways in which he influenced its development. Immediately after the war, Berkeley set out to educate his superiors at Prudential and the life insurance industry as a whole about the potential uses of computers for insurance; at the same time, he communicated that industry's needs, especially in the areas of rapid input-output and verification, to potential computer vendors. His internal efforts culminated in the contract Prudential signed for a Univac computer. Although the contract was ultimately broken, Berkeley's efforts appear to have influenced J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John Mauchly in their development of the technology. Berkeley's activities in the 1940s reveal that interaction between vendors and representatives of potential commercial users was earlier and more intense than historical accounts of computing generally recognize and that users may exert a powerful influence on the development of technology.

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“…Before the Computer (Cortada, 1993) puts the industry into its historical context, showing the extent to which the mainframe computer industry grew out of the earlier office machine industry. Norberg (1990) also showed the importance of punched‐card machine companies to scientific computing practice even before the development of electronic computers.…”

Section: Computer Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The history of information technology

Haigh

2011

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

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High-Technology Calculation in the Early 20th Century: Punched Card Machinery in Business and Government

Cited by 33 publications

References 0 publications

Sacred Excess: Organizational Ignorance in an Age of Toxic Data

Sacred Excess: Organizational Ignorance in an Age of Toxic Data

Early interactions between the life insurance and computer industries: the Prudential's Edmund C. Berkeley

The history of information technology

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