ABSTRACT
To understand the development of the computer industry, and how this apparently new industry was shaped by the past, one must understand the rise of the office-machine giants in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. Today, we use computers in the office for three main tasks: document preparation, information storage, and financial analysis and accounting. These were precisely the three key office activities that the business-machine companies of the late nineteenth century were established to serve. Remington Rand was the leading supplier of typewriters for document preparation and filing systems for information storage. In 1898 Rand organized the Rand Ledger Company, which quickly came to dominate the market for record-keeping systems in large firms. The development of mass-produced adding machines followed the development of the typewriter by roughly a decade, and there are many parallels in the development of the two industries.
