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NAZI Hollerith Tabulator(IBM) Links
At the facility's christening ceremony, which was attended by a top U.S. IBM executive and the elite of the Nazi Party, the head of IBM's German subsidiary gave a rousing speech about the important role that Hollerith tabulators played in Hitler's...
...drive to purify Germany and cleanse it of inferior racial stock.
"We are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body, " he said. "We report every individual characteristic...on a little card. ...
...These are not dead cards, quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics.
These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural body, and they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating machine."
On the surface, it may seem like the story of Herman Hollerith and the U.S. census are historical relics, an echo from a bygone era. But this history reveals an uncomfortable and fundamental truth about computer technology.
We can thank nativism and the census for helping to bring the computer age into existence.

Computer Age

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We can thank nativism and the census for helping to bring the computer age into existence.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act was one of the first instances of data protection law passed in the computer age.