Originally Posted by HuskyMan

most people are totally clueless as to the processing horsepower today's super computer systems possess. IBM got it's start by offering IT services to various governments for various purposes. one of those was Hitler's Third Reich Nazi regime and was used to track citizen information so the Nazis could determine who should be exterminated.

of course, only those bad bad nazis would think of using computers to do something so evil. all other governments only use computer processing power to do good things. right.

from Amazon's book review....

"The crucial technology was a precursor to the computer, the IBM Hollerith punch card machine, which Black glimpsed on exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, inspiring his five-year, top-secret book project. The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data. Black says the Hollerith and its punch card data ("hole 3 signified homosexual ... hole 8 designated a Jew") was indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort. Hitler's regime was fantastically, suicidally chaotic; could IBM have been the cause of its sole competence: mass-murdering civilians? Better scholars than I must sift through and appraise Black's mountainous evidence, but clearly the assessment is overdue."


http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0914153102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278517300&sr=8-1