touch every aspect of our lives. Such devices changed the

way we manage, work, and live. A machine that has done all

this and more now exists in nearly every business in the

United States. This incredible invention is the computer. The

electronic computer has been around for over a half-century,

but its ancestors have been around for 2000 years.

However, only in the last 40 years has the computer

changed American management to it's greatest extent. From

the first wooden abacus to the latest high-speed

microprocessor, the computer has changed nearly every

aspect of management, and our lives for the better.

The very earliest existence of the modern day computer's

ancestor is the abacus. These date back to almost 2000

years ago (Dolotta, 1985). It is simply a wooden rack

holding parallel wires on which beads are strung. When

these beads are moved along the wire according to

programming rules that the user must memorize. All ordinary

arithmetic operations can be performed on the abacus. This

was one of the first management tools used.

The next innovation in computers took place in 1694 when

Blaise Pascal invented the first digital calculating machine. It

could only add numbers and they had to be entered by

turning dials. It was designed to help Pascal's father, who

was a tax collector, manage the town's taxes (Beer, 1966).

In the early 1800s, a mathematics professor named Charles

Babbage designed an automatic calculation machine

(Dolotta, 1985). It was steam powered and could store up

to 1000 50-digit numbers. Built in to his machine were

operations that included everything a modern

general-purpose computer would need. It was programmed

by and stored data on cards with holes punched in them,

appropriately called punch cards. This machine was

extremely useful to managers that delt with large volumes of

good. With Babbage's machine, managers could more easily

calculate the large numbers accumulated by inventories. The

only problem was that there was only one of these machines

built, thus making it difficult for all managers to use (Beer,

After Babbage, people began to lose interest in computers.

However, between 1850 and 1900 there were great

advances in mathematics and physics that began to rekindle

the interest. Many of these new advances involved complex

calculations and formulas that were very time consuming for

human calculation. The first major use for a computer in the

U.S. was during the 1890 census. Two men, Herman

Hollerith and James Powers, developed a new

punched-card system that could automatically read

information on cards without human (Dolotta, 1985). Since

the population of the U.S. was increasing so fast, the

computer was an essential tool for managers in tabulating the

These advantages were noted by commercial industries and

soon led to the development of improved punch-card

business-machine systems by International Business

Machines, Remington-Rand, Burroughs, and other

corporations (Chposky, 1988). By modern standards the

punched-card machines were slow, typically processing

from 50 to 250 cards per minute, with each card holding up

to 80 digits. At the time, however, punched cards were an

enormous step forward; they provided a means of input,

output, and memory storage on a massive scale. For more

than 50 years following their first use, punched-card

machines did the bulk of the world's business computing

By the late 1930s punched-card machine techniques had

become so well established and reliable that Howard

Hathaway Aiken, in collaboration with engineers at IBM,

undertook construction of a large automatic digital computer

based on standard IBM electromechanical parts (Chposky,

1988). Aiken's machine, called the Harvard Mark I, handled

23-digit numbers and could perform all four arithmetic

operations (Dolotta, 1985). Also, it had special built-in

programs to handled logarithms and trigonometric functions.

The Mark I was controlled from prepunched paper tape.

Output was by card punch and electric typewriter. It was

slow, requiring 3 to 5 seconds for a multiplication, but it was

fully automatic and could complete long computations

The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need

for computing capability, especially for the military (Dolotta,

1985). New weapons systems were produced which

needed trajectory tables and other essential data. In 1942,

John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchley, and their associates at

the University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed

electronic computer to do the job. This machine became

known as ENIAC, for Electrical Numerical Integrator And

Calculator (Chposky, 1988). It could multiply two numbers

at the rate of 300 products per second, by finding the value

of each product from a multiplication table stored in its

memory. ENIAC was thus about 1,000 times faster than the

previous generation of computers. ENIAC u