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@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@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