From Bill Bennett's American Patriot's Almanac:
On June 8, 1887, a former Census Bureau employee named Herman Hollerith filed a patent for a “novel sorting device” he had devised as part of an “apparatus for compiling statistics.” His name is not as famous as it used to be, but Hollerith was one in a string of American inventors who ushered in the computer age. His machine used punch cards – cards with rows of holes representing information – to quickly tabulate statistics for millions of pieces of data.
Before Hollerith’s time it took the Census Bureau eight years to sort through information collected in its once-a-decade census. Hollerith’s system allowed workers to tally the 1890 population in just six weeks and publish refined data in a mere two years. “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed,” one expert marveled. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company later merged with two other companies to form the corporation known today as International Business Machines – IBM.
In June 1951 the world’s first commercial computer was put into service at the Census Bureau. The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was built by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. The next year, another UNIVAC machine astounded TV viewers when it accurately predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would win the 1952 presidential election.
In June 1977, Apple Computer, Inc., began selling the Apple II, the first widely successful personal computer. Apple was the brainchild of Stephen Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs, who sold his Volkswagen minibus to help fund the company started in his parents’ garage. By the early 1980s, microchips in the first generation of personal computers could perform close to 5 million operations per second, compared to the room-size UNIVAC’s 1,900.
Every day, Bill Bennett provides via email--for free--a reading from his American Patriot's Almanac. You’ll read about heroes, their achievements, and key events that took place “On This Day” in American history. Click here to subscribe.
Welcome to the Intersections Blog, where I try to work out where politics, pop culture, and the Bible meet
So What's This All About?
In case you didn't know, I'm in the multi-year-long process of posting a Christian devotional at the TAWG Blog. The TAWG Blog is, and always will be, mostly apolitical. For the most part, Bible-believing Christians will find little to disagree with there. But I also firmly believe that God's word can--and should--inform everything in life, and this should include politics and popular culture. How should we vote? How should we respond to hot topics such as abortion, capital punishment, taxes, and other issues? Which party, if either, is closer to the Biblical ideal? Tony Campolo and Ron Sider, Evangelicals whose political leanings are on the Left, have made the case in several of their writings that God wants his followers to vote politically on the Left more than on the Right. At times, some of them have gone so far as to equate voting on the Left with obedience to Christ, either subtly or not-so-subtly contending that the converse is true as well: If you vote Republican, you're sinning against the Savior.
I don't agree. I think that to the degree they actually resort to the Bible, they're misinterpreting it. With a whole bunch of caveats, I think politically conservative positions are a lot more compatible with the Scriptures than the Leftist positions.
Just to clarify, I would never accuse people who disagree with me--especially siblings in Christ--of what they accuse me of. I don't judge my own heart, much less anyone else's, and I don't equate political disagreement with theological fidelity to God. I have no reason to doubt their love for the Lord and "for the least of these," but I believe that they're sincerely wrong.
Just to clarify, I would never accuse people who disagree with me--especially siblings in Christ--of what they accuse me of. I don't judge my own heart, much less anyone else's, and I don't equate political disagreement with theological fidelity to God. I have no reason to doubt their love for the Lord and "for the least of these," but I believe that they're sincerely wrong.
So there are two main purposes for this blog. One is to make a case for my political beliefs based on Scripture. The other is a bit more vague, basically to work out my political beliefs and figure out what's based on Scripture and what's based on my own biases. I certainly don't have all the answers. Some of this stuff I'm still figuring out. And I'm certainly open to correction. As long as you make your case civilly and based on Scripture, feel free to make a comment, and I promise I'll post it and consider your arguments thoughtfully and prayerfully. Who knows? Maybe we'll learn a little something from each other.
May God bless our common striving together towards both the "little t" truth and "Big T" Truth. Our watchword here is a line from C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle: "Further up and further in!"
P.S. -- Below on the left is "Topics I've Covered" which lists everything I've posted topically. It's come to my attention that some people would like to see everything just listed for them. If that's you, you can get it here. Thanks to my friend Stephen Young for the tip!
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