I wrote:
> The government also paid for most of the development of computers in ENIAC > and in later projects such the MIT Project Whirlwind . . . > It began a lot earlier than that, in the 1880 when the Census Bureau paid Herman Hollerith to invent the punch card processing machines. His company became IBM. Their main customer continued to be the U.S. government. The Census Bureau was the main customer for computers well into the 1960s, especially the big, expensive ones with massive data capacity. They were processing records for 150 million people back in the days when most computer hard disks and tapes held ~10 megabytes. I visited the Census Bureau when I was a child, and saw dozens of computer tape drives and warehouses full of tapes. (My mother worked there.) The government also purchased supercomputers for weapons research long before they become commercially available. By "supercomputer" I mean machines that took up entire buildings and cost ~$100 million in the 1950s, or billions today. The UNIVAC LARC is a good example. The actual capacity was tiny by today's standards, but the machine cost a fortune. No The LARC had 97 kB main memory capacity. The memory devices were obsolete before the machine could be completed. They cost millions to develop. A terrific waste of money, if you want to look at that way. Making them advanced the state of the art. - Jed
