[SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems'

julie hugsted julie at hugsted.dk
Wed May 12 06:05:52 PDT 2010


Hello,

For those of you that are not on the H-SCI-MED-TECH mailing list and have
not seen this announcement, it might have interest
Best

Julie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nathan Ensmenger, H-SCI-MED-TECH <smtedit at mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Date: 2010/5/11
Subject: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems'
To: H-SCI-MED-TECH at h-net.msu.edu


Lars Heide.  Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information
Explosion, 1880--1945.  Baltimore  Johns Hopkins University Press,
2009.  369 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-9143-4.

Reviewed by Larry Frohmann (State University of New York at Stony
Brook)
Published on H-German (May, 2010)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing

The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems

 From their first major use in tabulating the 1890 United States
>
census to the breakthrough of digital computers and magnetic storage
in the 1970s, punched cards were the dominant technology for
processing the vast amounts of information needed by large, complex
enterprises and the modern social state. As Lars Heide makes clear in
_Punched-Card Systems_, without this information-processing
capability, the modern world would have looked quite different, and
certainly less modern.

Heide's prodigiously researched book provides a comparative study of
the development of punched-card technology and its application in the
United States, England, France, and Germany from the 1880s to the end
of World War II. His point of departure is a dissatisfaction or
discomfort with works in the sociology of technology that focus
primarily on the social impact of technology, while treating its
development as an external factor. Instead, Heide's aim here is to
develop an excentric or peripheral account that will explain the
trajectory of technological development--i.e., the decision to pursue
or neglect a technically feasible path of innovation--not in terms of
a company's ability to develop and market a given technology, but
rather as an attempt to meet the demands of its real or imagined
users and uses. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach,
Heide follows the development of punched-card technology through four
successive moments of provisional path stability, or technological
"closure," relating to its use for, first, the compilation of
counting-based census statistics; second, the processing of general
statistics, third, bookkeeping; and fourth, the operation of large
population registries.

The bulk of the book documents in great detail the wide variety of
user-related factors that shaped the development of these
applications in different national contexts. Such factors included:
the obstacles presented by prior commitment to an alternate path of
technological development; conditions of access to patented
technologies; the intrinsic complexity of punched-card technologies,
the ability to accumulate relevant expertise, the ability to leverage
knowledge in related manufacturing fields, and associated
difficulties in manufacture and operational reliability; the degree
to which the acceptance of one technology was dependent on the
development of ancillary technologies (such as the ability to print
the results of calculations or to store and operate with intermediate
sums); success in exploiting prime mover advantages (or the failure
to do so); the ability to raise sufficient operating capital and
effectively manage it; the development of business or social
processes of such scale and complexity that they could no longer be
adequately controlled through the use of manual methods of data
management; the willingness of potential public- and private-sector
users to invest in new data-processing technologies that could only
be profitably employed on a continuous basis; and the adoption of
punched-card technology by a user influential enough to serve as a
model for other potential users. Although these factors may
cumulatively shed a great deal of light on the theoretical question
that Heide set for himself, it is less clear that potential readers
will share this particular set of concerns. Ultimately, Heide's
decision to bracket the question of how this new technology affected
the organization and strategic functioning of firms and states or the
meaning of the information explosion that appears in the book's title
will limit the appeal of the book.

The one point where Heide looks beyond the dynamics of technological
change is his discussion in the final chapter of the use of punched
cards to maintain large population registries. These registries
enhanced the ability of nation-states to locate and control their
individual inhabitants. In this vein, card systems changed over time
in relation to different organizations' technological needs,
resulting in systems that were significantly different and more
powerful than the original system. Examples of institutions that
developed more sophisticated punched-card technology include the U.S.
Social Security system, the French national population and military
mobilization registry, and the belated efforts of the Nazis to
develop an automated registry of the entire population that would
help identify and exclude unwelcome members of society.

The one point where Heide looks beyond the dynamics of technological
change is his discussion of the use of punched cards to maintain
large population registries that enhanced the ability of
nation-states to locate and control their individual inhabitants.
Technologically, the card systems developed for the American Social
Security system, the French national population and military
mobilization registry, and the belated efforts of the Nazis to
develop an automated registry to facilitate the mobilization of the
population and the identification and exclusion of community aliens
all required new punched-card technologies that were different and
more powerful than those developed for existing bookkeeping systems.
In the long-simmering debate over the role of census data, population
registries, the _Volks_- and _Judenkarteien_, and punched-card
systems in the perpetration of the Holocaust, Heide stakes out a
rather moderate position. He argues, echoing claims made by others,
that the information contained in the nationwide network of locally
maintained manual population registries set up on the basis of the
1938 _Reichsmeldeordnung_ was, in conjunction with other information
available to the police and security agencies, more than adequate to
seek out Jews for deportation. This ability becomes all the more
important since it was possible even in the absence of an automated
national registry whose development was, in any case, blocked by the
resistance of the Gauleiter and other officials to the further
centralization of power in the hands of Albert Speer.

The book ultimately remains a narrowly focused study in the sociology
of technology. It does not address either the question of how this
new technology affected the organization and strategic functioning of
firms and states. Nor does Heide discuss the meaning of the
information explosion that appears in the book's title. Without
asking Heide to have written a different book that would add to the
substantial literature that does address these topics, there is no
way to dismiss the problem that Heide's decision to ignore these
issues will limit the appeal of the book for many audiences.

Citation: Larry Frohmann. Review of Heide, Lars, _Punched-Card
Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880--1945_. H-German,
H-Net Reviews. May, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30100

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.



-- 
Julie Katrine Hugsted
phone: DK: (+ 45) 51 92 02 83
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20100512/55e7d38a/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the Members mailing list