Word: punch-card
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Over the fall, Cambridge replaced its paper-ballot voting system with a new punch-card that can be read by computer. "We didn't have to find a small army of people to assist the operation, and those who worked in the day could go home at a reasonable hour," explained Election Commissioner Sondra Scheir. "The returns were also available at a far earlier hour than in the past...
...ballots.") The count began in earnest on Wednesday, the day, as wags point out, when the real politicking traditionally begins in Chicago. Before anyone could say Richard Daley, the city election board announced it was being hampered by repeated breakdowns of its new computer punch-card system...
...company has done more to change the way America works than International Business Machines Corp. Founded in 1911, IBM soon came to dominate the market for time clocks and punch-card tabulators. In the 1930s it pioneered the sale of electric typewriters. But its most revolutionary feat was to usher in the computer age. With vision and drive, IBM increased the electronic brain power of American business and then spread that boon around the world. In the 1960s and '70s, roughly two-thirds of all computers sold bore the IBM trademark. The company was so overpowering that the eight...
...were electrical rather than mechanical. He rose to general sales manager at a crucial time. Learson still admits that parts of computer technology are "over my head," but in the early 1950s he and Tom Jr. strenuously argued, against the elder Watson's opposition, that IBM's punch-card equipment would soon be outdated by electronic computers, an innovation then dominated by Sperry-Rand's Univac. The younger guard won out, and IBM poured vast resources into its own computer designs. After the corporation introduced the 700 series of computers, its tough-selling teams made those machines...
...being forced to choose between the poor and the public schools or other essential services. Moreover, the U.S. is distributing aid through an administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage...