Gustav Tauschek

Gustav Tauschek (April 29, 1899, Vienna, Austria – February 14, 1945, Zürich, Switzerland) was an Austrian pioneer of Information technology and developed numerous improvements for punched card-based calculating machines from 1922 to 1945.

Biography

During the years 1926 – 1930 he worked for the Rheinische Metallwaren- und Maschinenfabrik (Rheinmetall) in Sömmerda, Germany, where he developed a complete punched card-based accounting system, which was never mass-produced. The prototype of that system is currently stored in the archives of the Vienna Technical Museum. In the spring of 1928, Rheinmetall created a subsidiary company that was assigned to develop new punched card-based machines. In the fall of the same year, the subsidiary was bought by IBM, thereby assuring its monopoly on the market. Tauschek was awarded a five-year contract and sold 169 patents to IBM in his lifetime.

Gustav Tauschek died of an embolism on February 14, 1945 in a hospital in Zürich, Switzerland.

Literature

Martin Helfert, Petra Mazuran, Christoph M. Wintersteiger: Gustav Tauschek und seine Maschinen, Linz: Trauner, 2007, in German. (Schriftenreihe Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik; Bd. 10) ISBN 978-3-85499-062-8

Martin Helfert, Christoph M. Wintersteiger: Gustav Tauschek's Punchcard Accounting Machines, Proceedings of the Workshop on Methodic and Didactic Challenges of the History of Informatics (MEDICHI 2007), OCG 220, Austrian Computer Society, 2007.

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