Particularly in the United States, where skilled clerks were in short supply, executives encouraged the development and use of office equipment such as typewriters, adding machines, and tabulating ...

Developed by Herman Hollerith, a Census Bureau statistician, the machine was first used to count the U.S. census of 1890. It was so successful that Hollerith later formed the Tabulating Machine ...

Still, the machine age was not so kind to @. The first typewriters, built in the mid-1800s, didn’t include @. Likewise, @ was not among the symbolic array of the earliest punch-card tabulating ...