All Mechanical and Pre-Electronic Computing Pioneers

This child group of Early Computing Machines and Historical Pioneers gathers the small number of pioneers whose contribution predates electronic computing altogether: designers of mechanical calculating devices, punched card tabulating machines and other pre-electronic apparatus for automating arithmetic or data processing, including Charles Babbage's unbuilt analytical engine, Wilhelm Schickard's seventeenth century calculating clock, and Herman Hollerith's punched card tabulator that became the founding technology of IBM. Their shared work is mechanizing computation before the vacuum tube or the transistor existed, as distinct from the electronic machines their ideas made possible.