Sindelfingen

Sindelfingen

http://it-so-happened-it-so-happened.blogspot.com/2010/08/Sindelfingen.html

The taxi brought us to the Mercedes-Benz reception centre in Sindelfingen where I was identified as the would-be owner of my custom-built car

Sindelfingen is about 18 km south west of Stuttgart, the state capital of Baden-Württemberg. The town is located at the Schwippe river headwaters. It has automotive and computer industry and is home of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class luxury cars, a series of the largest sedans produced by Mercedes Benz. The name "S-Class" is derived from the German word that means "special class", or "In a class of its own".

We were taken to a large room with displays of earlier models and the past history of Mercedes-Benz as the world-famous car manufacturer. I learnt that the origins of the Daimler-Benz company, founded through a merger in 1926, dated back to the mid-1880s when G. Daimler (1834–1900) working with W. Maybach (1846–1929) and K. Benz
(1844–1929) independently invented the internal combustion engine-powered automobile in south-western Germany.

With the Black Forest not far away, Sindelfingen is the largest town in the administrative district of Böblingen. The first documented mention of Sindelfingen was in 1155. Women from Sindelfingen are reported to have suffered much in the 16th and 17th centuries due to the witch hunts.

During the Middle Ages Sindelfingen had notable weaving industry. Hand weaving enjoyed an important position in the 19th century, until the textile industry was adversely affected by Asian imports. As a result, some former weaving mills were used as offices for the computer industry.

Computer tabulating technology developed primarily from the punched card data gathering techniques of the weaving mills. The need arose to replace the pen and paper compilation of census date by a faster method.

The 1880 U.S. census had taken seven years to tabulate. The data so collected were almost obsolete by the time the figures were made available. Due to rapid growth of the U.S. population from rising immigration, it was estimated that the 1890 census would take much longer. As such a faster technique of tabulating data was vital to be useful.

Herman Hollerith (1860 – 1929), a German-American statistician, is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. Invented by him in 1884 to improve the speed and accuracy of calculating the U.S. census, his punched card tabulating machines were developed and used for the 1890 census, which took only one year.

Such machines were in use also for censuses in Canada and many other countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The punched data card tabulating and sorting machines dominated the computing industry through the mid-1970s.

Hollerith's companies were merged to be renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924, a Forbes 500 company.

Facsimile

Facsimile

http://it-so-happened-it-so-happened.blogspot.com/2010/08/Facsimile.hyml

We wanted to make an early start to arrive in time to take delivery of our car from the Mercedes-Benz Factory in Sidelfingen. Getting up early to do so signified our desire to enjoy every minute of such a day. The breakfast served to us offered a great selection, and we had ample intake to keep us going. Lavinia was excited to take possession of a car that will drive us through many countries to reach Iran.

Staying overnight at Holiday Inn was quite comfortable and refreshing. It was made possible with help from Leon, our brother-in-law, in England. He booked reservation at Holiday Inn by facsimile mail. As a well-established business executive in London, he had been already using it for his transactions wherever such a facility was available in Europe.

Facsimile mailing was still in its early stages at the start of our travel. We were impressed with the rapidity in receiving written confirmation of our forthcoming stay in Stuttgart. And especially so when an unexpected change was required because of a directive from Rome asking me to arrive a day earlier to attend a briefing session organized for those undertaking FAO assignments in other countries.

"It is so immediate and convenient," said Lavinia. I agreed and warmly nodded my affirmation.

In stead of making phone calls at different times from widely separated global locations, facsimile mail provided a trust-worthy communication technique of sending letters for exact reproduction elsewhere. We were intrigued and pleased how a fax (short for facsimile) could send a document over telephone lines.

The history of the facsimile was started with the invention in Scotland. It was 1842when Alexander Bain, Scottish clockmaker, made a machine that could receive signals from a telegraph wire and translate these into images on paper.

Facsimile machines existed in different forms since the 19th century. Modern fax machines became feasible only in the mid-1970s, with sophistication of technology and lower cost. Newspaper publishers and TV broadcasters had employed the first facsimile machines for transmitting photographs.

Japan presented a problem in using the competing technologies such as teleprinter. As it was faster to handwrite the Japanese language characters than to type them, a facsimile had clear advantage. Due to the unique requirements of the Japanese markets, facsimile machines had great potential in the country.

Japan successfully managed to lower the production costs through advanced technology, and soon led the world in the utilization of facsimile service. In the 1970s, there was rapid innovation in the facsimile industry and many standards were set.

Initially, government agencies were the prime users. Japan was the first to allow facsimile transmission over public telephone system in 1972, and in early 1970s the Japanese government was also one of the first to give facsimile documents legal approval.

Over time, faxing has gradually became affordable, and by the mid-1980s fax machines became smaller and compact and very popular around the world.