Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (review)

422 contract for providing punch-card services to the U.S. government. The unique demands of the job prompted further innovations in collating and posting technology. In Germany, the Nazi government used punch-card technology to gather statistics on war production. In occupied France, a Vichy government administrator named René Carmille managed, without being detected by the Germans, to develop a secret registry of 300,000 ablebodied males in hopeful anticipation of mobilizing them for an armed uprising (Carmille was arrested for Resistance activities in 1944 and died in Dachau). The increasing use of punch-card machines in the administrative machinery of government helps explain why it took well into the 1960s for IBM’s computer sales to overtake its core punch-card business. It also reveals the relative insignificance of scientific computing in this period, compared to business and government data-processing (the former consumed several hundred thousand punch-cards annually, the latter several tens of millions). As a historian of information technology, I am familiar with most of the available literature on punch-card technology. But it was only after reading Lars Heide that I felt I truly understood how such systems worked in practice, and the specific ways in which these systems both prefigured— and differed significantly from—later developments in electronic computing. Heide has produced an important contribution to the literature in business history and the history of information technology. For historians of technology more generally, his work should be seen as an exemplary application of a technically detailed but entirely non-deterministic history of innovation in one of the most significant technological industries of the modern era.