Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCimLnIsDA (2 minutes) to hear the story from the developer's point of view. Then consider how many totalitarian states today are using IBM computers to track their population.
The developer might not realize it, but IBM lawyers absolutely know that they can be fairly accused of using JSLint for evil.
Nah, the CIA, NSA only uses IBM mainframes to administrative tasks like payroll.
For all the tracking and spying their own population stuff they use linux like the rest of us.
A lot of large organizations jumped on mainframes back in the 1960s and 1970s. That included US-friendly governments. Some of whom aren't very nice. Those systems and business relationships tend to survive. IBM is good about keeping it quiet. But occasionally someone notices and there is a scandal. The last major one was in 2019 when people found out that IBM was selling face recognition technology to United Arab Emirates. IBM discontinued that technology in 2020 because of the scandal.
Those census records would have been awesome. I was lamenting it's absence just yesterday.
Historians that I have encountered all say early 1800s for punch cards. For example the Smithsonian: https://www.si.edu/spotlight/punch-cards. Are you confusing those with earlier developments in textiles?
I also doubt your claim about when the industrial revolution started. Historians do differ on when the industrial revolution started. But you normally see figures in second half of the 1700s. For example they might cite James Watts' improvements to the steam engine in 1778.
For early 1700s you might be thinking of the steam engine, which was already in use. But the early steam engines were extremely inefficient. Their only real use case was for pumping water out of coal mines where both coal and water were available. The coal itself was being mined for use in fireplaces to keep people warm in the winter, because the forests had been cut down so there was no wood available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_de_Vaucanson
Funnily enough the Smithsonian doesn't mention his invention in their article on him:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/eighteenth-century...
Believe it or not, they date back to the early 1800s and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine for weaving cloth. They became used for computing in the late 1800s, notably for the 1890 census with https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/th....
The inventor of that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith, founded one of four companies that became CTR, which was later named IBM.
When electronic stored computers became a thing, IBM naturally moved from mechanical computing with punch cards to using electronic computing with data and programs off of punch cards.
We like thinking of computing having started with electronic computers. It really didn't. Punch cards were the last relic of a history of mechanical computing that predated transistors, electronic computers, and even the vacuum tubes that electronic computers were first built from!