Fast, faster, fastest: a history of supercomputers from the CDC 6600 to Fugaku

Computing has always been about speed. Herman Hollerith‘s first job was to work on the 1880 US census. It was done by hand, painful, slow, and prone to errors. So, Hollerith created the Hollerith 1890 Census Tabulator punch card system to count the 1890 census results. His electromechanical devices could do the job in a remarkably quick two-years and saved the government $5 million. Using his profits, he established his own company, the Tabulating Machine Company. You know it better as IBM.

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