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.