I recently made a visit was to the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, and learned some surprising facts about computers, going back to ancient Greece. What surprised me is that electronic computers didn’t suddenly appear in the 1940s with ENIAC, but had their germination in 1890 with the first widespread use of punch cards. And that was also the really beginning of IBM.
Learn about the origins of MP3 music files, and the song from ground zero – and many other things! Know how the term “counter” became applied to the kitchen?
Lots of pictures and more, and we are running out of room here. It’s over at Chicago Boyz.
The Lexicans 
The Hollerith card was used in the Census of 1890, IIRC. By WW2 we saw card sorters, and my wife used to play games with touristas using one. Computers as we know them did not appear until the 50s and they used Hollerith cards for both programs and data. Jerry Pournelle told his using one for a research project for the Navy while he was a grad student at UWashington. His part was writing subroutine to invert a matrix which had to be done in machine language as higher languages were not available at the time.
As for the space limit, I would suggest deleting older posts.