Corinna Schlombs

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: This paper investigates IBM’s role in the history of data entry, the obligatory yet often-overlooked step in automatic information processing. In the first two decades of electronic computing, IBM held a virtual monopoly on data entry devices. However, as the need for data entry reached critical dimensions in the late 1960s, IBM’s market share plummeted from 80 to 24% within a decade. Technological change challenging IBM’s dominance in this market also had important implications for those working with IBM data entry devices. Based on a closer investigation of the history of data entry, this paper calls into question assumptions about corporate and labor effects from technological change at a time when generative AI technologies are expected to result in domestic and global corporate and labor changes.