From the Abacus to Punch Card Machines

The history of the computer begins with the Roman's Abacus  or probably even further back as Vorndran points out (19). Since the middle-ages, calculating machines working with cog wheels and other mechanical devices had been designed and constructed throughout Europe, for example in 1623 by Schickard  in Tübingen and in 1642 by Pascal  in Paris (30-54). All these machines had in common that their hardware had to be manipulated directly in order to interact with the machine; the "program" was a fixed part of the machine (Klaeren 13).
In 1728, Falcon  built a loom that was controlled by a block of wood with holes in it (Vorndran 57). This technique was enhanced in 1805 by Jacquard , who used thick paper instead of wood in order to "program" the looms (58). This was presumably the first time that a machine was not manipulated directly; programs were written on a medium, a predecessor of the punch card,  which simplified working with the machine.
Charles Babbage's  analytical engine , which he began to design in 1833, was the first programmable calculating machine. It could be regarded as the first digital computer due to its use of the dual system invented by Leibnitz in the 17th century (Ebeling 75; Tanenbaum 5; Vorndran 69-73). Although the analytical machine could never be finished because of the mechanical constraints of that time, Ada Byron wrote the first computer program in history, although "only" in theory (Ebeling 76, Zuse 72).
In 1890, Hermann Hollerith  used punch cards  as data memory for punch card machines  for the 11th National Census of America (Vorndran 59-65). Before that time, it had taken up to nine years to analyze the data. Using punch cards and machines, Hollerith managed to calculate the outcome of the census within four weeks (Ebeling 76; Vorndran 65). As a consequence, punch cards became very common in the business world (Vorndran 65-67). After several mergers, Hollerith's company "Tabulating Machines" later became the "International Business Machines Corporation",  more commonly known as IBM. IBM dominated the computer market until the late 1980s  (Ebeling 76; Watson 20-22).