Gustav Tauschek

Gustav Tauschek, who lived from 29 April 1899 in Vienna, Austria to 14 February 1945 in Zürich, Switzerland, was an Austrian pioneer of information technology who developed numerous improvements for punched card-based calculating machines from 1922 to 1945. From 1926 till 1930 he developed a complete punched card-based accounting system, the System Tauschek, which was never mass-produced and is now stored in the archives of the Technisches Museum Wien. In 1932 he built a magnetic drum memory. Throughout the 1930s he worked as a consultant to IBM, for which he built a reading-writing calculator, constructed a range of data storage devices with magnetized steel plates, and built an accounting machine capable of storing the records of 10,000 bank accounts. He died of an embolism in a hospital in Zürich on 14 February 1945.