The Joke's On Me...

In the Brass and Steel stories, I've made great use of Herman Hollerith's name as one of the technology greats behind my 19th century computer revolution. (In the real world, he invented Hollerith cards, first used to tabulate the 1890 Census) Today I decided that the precursors of IBM needed to show up as eager young startups (since IBM itself wasn't founded until 1911, and City of Glass is set in 1897). IBM, formerly known as the Computing Tabulating Recording company, was made up of the merger of three smaller companies; the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale company. You can see where this is going. The Tabulating Machine Company was Hollerith's company. So one of my usual gags writing Steampunk turns out to be exactly backwards. Heh. :) -JRS