Herman Hollerith and James Powers developed a new hole punch system that could read the cards automatically without human intervention. Since the population was growing so fast in the U.S computers was a big tool in number crunching. Commercial industries liked what they seen so some of them took part in the new trend of calculating by computers. That led to the development of a new computer, which was built by International Business Machines (IBM). By modern standards the old hole punch system was slow. Processing from 50 to 250 cards per minute, with each card holding up to 80 digits. At the time however punched cards were an enormous step forward, they provided a means of input, output, and memory storage on a massive scale. For more than 50 years following the first use the hole punch system did the bulk of the world's business computing and a good portion of computing work in science. By the late 1930's engineers at IBM collaborated with Horward Hathaway Aiken and begin construction of a large automatic digital computer. That machine was called the Harvard Mark I. It handled 23 digit numbers and could perform all four arithmetic operations. It also had special programs to handle logarithms and trigonometric functions as well. The Mark I was controlled from a prepunched paper tape. Output was by cardpunch and electric typewriter. It was slow, requiring 3 to 5 seconds for a multiplication, but it was fully automatic. .
The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need for computing capability for the military. New weapons were produced which needed trajectory tables and other data. In 1942, John W. Mauchley and their associates at the University of Pennsylvania built a high-speed computer. This machine was known as the ENIAC. It could multiply two numbers at the rate of 300 products per second. It done so by finding the value of each product in a multiplication table stored in it's memory.