ABSTRACT
From a technological perspective, Herman Hollerith had done little more than reapply Jacquard's principle in an electro-mechanical counting apparatus, but in a larger sense he was reprising a long-lived system for mechanical memory. Hollerith-type card readers were a recurring basic technology in calculating systems down to the fairly recent past, when many business computing systems routinely employed punched cards. For any liberal democratic society, the systematic and equitable subsidizing of technological innovation in the absence of a pressing national threat is an exceedingly difficult task. Claude Shannon's startling discovery was that systems of electrical switches conform in their behaviour according to the laws of Boolean algebra. After its adoption, different hardware components of the computer system began to be explicitly considered as resources, as an industrial engineer might think of equipment on a factory floor, and issues involving the most economical balance of computational resources came to dominate the design of the computers.
