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Edwin Blacks book IBM and the Halocaust details this and has extensive sources. A start would be to add the 1939 Nazi racial census to the timeline, the largest, fastest and most extensive census at that time.
About this census, Black writes:
"The additional Hollerith machinery assembled was massive: 400 electrical key punches, 10 gang punches, 20 summary punches, 300 key punchverifiers, 70 sorters, 50 tabulators, 25 duplicators, and 50 D-11 VZ tabulators. The Reich had imposed seemingly impossible target delivery dates for November 1939. So to increase speed, Dehomag's engineers converted their versatile D-11 calculating tabulator into a pure counting machine dubbed the D-11 VZ. The improvised device could process 12,000 60-column punched cards per hour in sixteen counters and then precision-punch its own summaries onto 80-column cards. Eighty million cards were actually used. 5" IBM and the Halocaust by Edwin Black page 175.
Black gives these sources for the above statement (which I am not in a position to verify):
5. "Aus dem Volkszahlungshaus in Berlin," Der Stromkreis (Werkzeitschrift DEHOMAG), Berlin, 66 (February 1940): 1-8, cited in Friedrich W Kistermann, "Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 19:2 (April-June 1997); Hollerith-Tabelliermaschine D-11 mit Zahleinrichtung (D 11 VZ), (Berlin: Dehomag, 1939) cited in Kistermann, "Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work"; Letter, J.G. Johnston to J.E. Holt, June 14, 1938, Department of Justice, War Division, Economic Warfare Section, NA RG60; also see Biehler, "Lochkartenmaschinen im Dienste der Reichsstatistik," Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv (ASA) 28 (1938/39): 90ff, 93.
CouldThatBe ( talk) 16:53, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Some pages for various forms of unit record equipment are pointing to this page as the "main page", but, as User:R. S. Shaw noted in his removal of one such link from IBM 407, "main is used for sections, not whole article". It might be more appropriate to add a "Unit record equipment" category and have the pages currently using {{Main|Unit record equipment}} instead use [[Category:Unit record equipment]]. Guy Harris 22:07, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Described on UNIVAC page as having a stored program and a programming language. If this is a unit record machine, then wouldn't the IBM 1401 also be a unit record machine? 69.106.232.37 20:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
This sentence from the 2nd paragraph needs clarification:
"The automatic operation of some unit record machines was directed by control panels, wired to directed the operation for a specific application."
Looks good, thanks!
This was just removed from the article by ClueBot as possible vandalism by 66.83.148.18, but I think it is fair criticism that belongs here: "but of course none of the smart people tell us how it works!!!!!!"-- agr ( talk) 19:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
OK, here's a first cut at how it works.
A key concept for modern readers is to understand that none of the unit record machines have any significant amount of memory. The tabulators have the most, with 10 to 40 multi-digit counters and some "selectors" (relays) which can hold one bit of state. The sorters only read one column at a time and lack any storage devices at all. The cards are the file storage.
An invoicing/billing system might work like this:
That's automated data processing. -- John Nagle ( talk) 04:22, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
The one piece of equipment that doesn't have a article is the collator. The major collators were the IBM 77 and IBM 85/87; the IBM 188, from 1961, was the last, as by then computers were coming in. [5]. The first collators were developed for the U.S. Social Security Administration. [6]. Collators do matching and merging of previously sorted decks. They can combine cards from two input sources, or keep them completely separate. These were the machines that added "join" capability to unit record processing, which made the whole process much more general and allowed for more error checking.
I vividly recall encountering the term "unit record" in my earlier decades (I'm closer to 75), and feeling very frustrated because I seemed to be the only one who didn't know what it meant. (What in the blazes is the "unit"?) I scanned this article with a Find command, and feel confident in saying that "unit record" is not defined anywhere! As far as I can tell, a tab. card is a unit record -- it's one self-contained collection (record) of data. I'm still not sure enough to actually edit the article, however.
Fwiw, I can recall continuation cards, for more data than could fit onto one card.
Regards, Nikevich ( talk) 09:45, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
We didn't think of them that way, but tab cards were very-low-cost precision mechanical entities, made to tight tolerances.
One nasty trick was to shave a few thousandths of an inch off the bottom edge of a card. I was told that such a card would mis-read sometimes, but wouldn't appear to have anything wrong with it. Careful comparison with a known-good new card would reveal the discrepancy.
I worked briefly in one large installation, where probably several 100,000 cards were handled per day. I can recall flat surfaces with a low vertical wall to their left; an operator would place a poorly-stacked deck onto the flat surface, and repeatedly lift the right edge and drop it while pushing the deck to the left. In a few seconds, the cards were all neatly aligned.
Now and then, a card would become creased or otherwise cease to be flat. Instead of keypunching a replacement, sometimes it was enough to apply a hot clothes iron (no steam, just about sure) to flatten it. In this installation, the irons were kept hot, and placed into fire-resistant topless and frontless benchtop safety "bins" apparently made of bonded asbestos.
In addition to keypunching, one could request that a punched deck be verified; the procedure was much like keypunching, except that the card was read, a column at a time, as the operator read from the handwritten (or possibly printed) form. Programmers (I was one, for a few months) requested keypunching and verifying.
Singer developed a prototype drum memory for the electromechanical machines this article described; it was called the SEMA, for Singer Electronic Machine Accounting, iirc. My job was to integrate it with the existing machines, which used lots of electromagnets and had sparking contacts. I tried to suppress the EMI; had some luck.
Regards, Nikevich ( talk) 10:07, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
In Arthur C. Clarke's early short story Rescue Party, the alien explorers find a "... wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and the five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet". Writing in 1946, Clarke, like almost all sci-fi authors, had not then foreseen the development and eventual ubiquity of the computer. PhilUK ( talk) 22:00, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I removed footnote 1, which contained the following text:
In the late 1800s, early 1900s unit record was a reference to the recording of all information about a transaction or object on one document. At that time the library index card was pointed out as an early example of a unit record. Even unit record desks were manufactured, a desk that included what later, for punched cards, would be called a tub file. This quote We had records of every car and locomotive on the railroad on a key-punched card or other unit record, either generated in the Car Accountant's Office or through other means, from Report of the Railway Accounting Officers. Vol. 77. Association of American Railroads: Accounting Division. 1888. p. 107. shows that in 1888 1) users were applying the term unit record to punched cards and 2) the term's use was more general than just punched cards. Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929, 2011, MIT, credits Conrad Gessner with developing the unit record concept.
Overall, it appears to be
WP:OR. Also, it is hard to determine from the text what specific sources contain or support what specific content. In some cases, the lack of full citations makes it unclear what work is cited. Also, Wikipedia does not use italic to indicate quotations; either use quotation marks or, for longer quotations, block-quotation markup: <blockquote></blockquote>
If someone reworks this text with appropriate citations, it probably belongs in the body of the article, possibly in a section called Etymology or Etymology and early usage. In my opinion, it is too long for a footnote. Also, having this material in the text would enable complete source citations in footnotes, without interrupting the flow of the text.— Finell 06:16, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
1) It allows for text from any field of study with "unit records".
2) Further, "Unit Record ..." is NOT the common name. As best I recall, Wikipedia wants common names and the common name is "punched card machines" or "... equipment". See for example "Early Punched Card Equipment, 1880 - 1951" "This article was initially written as part of the IEEE STARS program."
To checkout the "common name", just do a Google search for "unit record" and see what you find.
Cortada's "Historical Dictionary of Data Processing" has index entries for "punched card" but not "unit record". Williams "A History of ..." 1st ed has entries for "punched card" but not "unit record".
A better title would be "Punched Card Machines". That could be prefixed with "Data Processing", but the machines had more uses than just data processing. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 16:51, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 5 external links on Unit record equipment. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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-- http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/productDescriptions contains A-4060_IBM_Products_1940.pdf -- I wasn't able to access bitsavers.org. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 06:42, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
-- www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory.html seems to have changed to http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history. But... The "acis" (it relates to Frank's new job, or at least the org. that gives him access - I've not talked to him in a long time) works, but what is displayed is the old cu/computinghistory. And the www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory.html works when the ".html" is deleted. So what's out there right now is
*[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory Columbia University Computing History] [http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html IBM Tabulators and Accounting Machines] etc...
and I've no idea as to what is going on. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 07:50, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
Text such as this
is common throughout the various punched card articles. But Powers machines were electromechanical; they were powered by electricity. Yes, mechanical linkages were used instead of relays, but is that the sole criteria for mechanical vs electromechanical? 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 14:43, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
I made this edit to call attention to a sentence fragment.
It is ok for item lists to be e.g. simple lists of terms, names of things, etc. It is also ok for an item list to contain descriptions of events (e.g. company A acquired company B). The item list here contains some of each and is this inconsistent. In this particular case, it is not at all clear why the 80-column punched card is mentioned in the entry for 1928. Was it introduced in that year? In that case the word "introduced" or similar should appear. Or was it solely associated with The Tabulating Machine Company? Or what?
Since many entries in the list are complete sentences, with verbs, they of course all should be. Jeh ( talk) 18:56, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
The article states that "In the 1880s Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine." However, Babbage's Analytical_Engine design used punched cards for both instructions and data, in the 1830s. In the Wikipedia article on Punched_card it lists five prior designs, at least one of which was built, but still assigns the invention to Hollerith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.187.188.94 ( talk) 14:41, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
As mentioned by someone before, this article is in need of a section about the origins of the term unit record equipment and who used it first. -- 217.149.171.189 ( talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
FWIW, I've never heard the 1401, UNIVAC 1005 or any other stored-program computer referred to as unit-record equipment. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 17:24, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
Currently the Keypunch section has only a short paragraph with a {{
main|Keypunch}}
template, along with a comment that the individual units are accounted for in the main article. Is this a poster child for the use of Labeled Section Transclusion (
LST)?
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk) 13:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
In the 1960s the term keypunch girl was more common than keypunch operator. Should the Keypunch section mention the term even though it is potentially offensive? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 13:46, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Unit record equipment#Timeline claims The IBM
System/3, renting for less than $1,000 a month, the ancestor of IBM's
midrange computer product line, aka.
minicomputers,
however
DEC was using the term minicomputer well before then. --
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk) 15:38, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
The paragraph doesn’t claim first use of the term. Peter Flass ( talk) 19:07, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
Edwin Blacks book IBM and the Halocaust details this and has extensive sources. A start would be to add the 1939 Nazi racial census to the timeline, the largest, fastest and most extensive census at that time.
About this census, Black writes:
"The additional Hollerith machinery assembled was massive: 400 electrical key punches, 10 gang punches, 20 summary punches, 300 key punchverifiers, 70 sorters, 50 tabulators, 25 duplicators, and 50 D-11 VZ tabulators. The Reich had imposed seemingly impossible target delivery dates for November 1939. So to increase speed, Dehomag's engineers converted their versatile D-11 calculating tabulator into a pure counting machine dubbed the D-11 VZ. The improvised device could process 12,000 60-column punched cards per hour in sixteen counters and then precision-punch its own summaries onto 80-column cards. Eighty million cards were actually used. 5" IBM and the Halocaust by Edwin Black page 175.
Black gives these sources for the above statement (which I am not in a position to verify):
5. "Aus dem Volkszahlungshaus in Berlin," Der Stromkreis (Werkzeitschrift DEHOMAG), Berlin, 66 (February 1940): 1-8, cited in Friedrich W Kistermann, "Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 19:2 (April-June 1997); Hollerith-Tabelliermaschine D-11 mit Zahleinrichtung (D 11 VZ), (Berlin: Dehomag, 1939) cited in Kistermann, "Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work"; Letter, J.G. Johnston to J.E. Holt, June 14, 1938, Department of Justice, War Division, Economic Warfare Section, NA RG60; also see Biehler, "Lochkartenmaschinen im Dienste der Reichsstatistik," Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv (ASA) 28 (1938/39): 90ff, 93.
CouldThatBe ( talk) 16:53, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Some pages for various forms of unit record equipment are pointing to this page as the "main page", but, as User:R. S. Shaw noted in his removal of one such link from IBM 407, "main is used for sections, not whole article". It might be more appropriate to add a "Unit record equipment" category and have the pages currently using {{Main|Unit record equipment}} instead use [[Category:Unit record equipment]]. Guy Harris 22:07, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Described on UNIVAC page as having a stored program and a programming language. If this is a unit record machine, then wouldn't the IBM 1401 also be a unit record machine? 69.106.232.37 20:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
This sentence from the 2nd paragraph needs clarification:
"The automatic operation of some unit record machines was directed by control panels, wired to directed the operation for a specific application."
Looks good, thanks!
This was just removed from the article by ClueBot as possible vandalism by 66.83.148.18, but I think it is fair criticism that belongs here: "but of course none of the smart people tell us how it works!!!!!!"-- agr ( talk) 19:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
OK, here's a first cut at how it works.
A key concept for modern readers is to understand that none of the unit record machines have any significant amount of memory. The tabulators have the most, with 10 to 40 multi-digit counters and some "selectors" (relays) which can hold one bit of state. The sorters only read one column at a time and lack any storage devices at all. The cards are the file storage.
An invoicing/billing system might work like this:
That's automated data processing. -- John Nagle ( talk) 04:22, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
The one piece of equipment that doesn't have a article is the collator. The major collators were the IBM 77 and IBM 85/87; the IBM 188, from 1961, was the last, as by then computers were coming in. [5]. The first collators were developed for the U.S. Social Security Administration. [6]. Collators do matching and merging of previously sorted decks. They can combine cards from two input sources, or keep them completely separate. These were the machines that added "join" capability to unit record processing, which made the whole process much more general and allowed for more error checking.
I vividly recall encountering the term "unit record" in my earlier decades (I'm closer to 75), and feeling very frustrated because I seemed to be the only one who didn't know what it meant. (What in the blazes is the "unit"?) I scanned this article with a Find command, and feel confident in saying that "unit record" is not defined anywhere! As far as I can tell, a tab. card is a unit record -- it's one self-contained collection (record) of data. I'm still not sure enough to actually edit the article, however.
Fwiw, I can recall continuation cards, for more data than could fit onto one card.
Regards, Nikevich ( talk) 09:45, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
We didn't think of them that way, but tab cards were very-low-cost precision mechanical entities, made to tight tolerances.
One nasty trick was to shave a few thousandths of an inch off the bottom edge of a card. I was told that such a card would mis-read sometimes, but wouldn't appear to have anything wrong with it. Careful comparison with a known-good new card would reveal the discrepancy.
I worked briefly in one large installation, where probably several 100,000 cards were handled per day. I can recall flat surfaces with a low vertical wall to their left; an operator would place a poorly-stacked deck onto the flat surface, and repeatedly lift the right edge and drop it while pushing the deck to the left. In a few seconds, the cards were all neatly aligned.
Now and then, a card would become creased or otherwise cease to be flat. Instead of keypunching a replacement, sometimes it was enough to apply a hot clothes iron (no steam, just about sure) to flatten it. In this installation, the irons were kept hot, and placed into fire-resistant topless and frontless benchtop safety "bins" apparently made of bonded asbestos.
In addition to keypunching, one could request that a punched deck be verified; the procedure was much like keypunching, except that the card was read, a column at a time, as the operator read from the handwritten (or possibly printed) form. Programmers (I was one, for a few months) requested keypunching and verifying.
Singer developed a prototype drum memory for the electromechanical machines this article described; it was called the SEMA, for Singer Electronic Machine Accounting, iirc. My job was to integrate it with the existing machines, which used lots of electromagnets and had sparking contacts. I tried to suppress the EMI; had some luck.
Regards, Nikevich ( talk) 10:07, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
In Arthur C. Clarke's early short story Rescue Party, the alien explorers find a "... wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and the five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet". Writing in 1946, Clarke, like almost all sci-fi authors, had not then foreseen the development and eventual ubiquity of the computer. PhilUK ( talk) 22:00, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I removed footnote 1, which contained the following text:
In the late 1800s, early 1900s unit record was a reference to the recording of all information about a transaction or object on one document. At that time the library index card was pointed out as an early example of a unit record. Even unit record desks were manufactured, a desk that included what later, for punched cards, would be called a tub file. This quote We had records of every car and locomotive on the railroad on a key-punched card or other unit record, either generated in the Car Accountant's Office or through other means, from Report of the Railway Accounting Officers. Vol. 77. Association of American Railroads: Accounting Division. 1888. p. 107. shows that in 1888 1) users were applying the term unit record to punched cards and 2) the term's use was more general than just punched cards. Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929, 2011, MIT, credits Conrad Gessner with developing the unit record concept.
Overall, it appears to be
WP:OR. Also, it is hard to determine from the text what specific sources contain or support what specific content. In some cases, the lack of full citations makes it unclear what work is cited. Also, Wikipedia does not use italic to indicate quotations; either use quotation marks or, for longer quotations, block-quotation markup: <blockquote></blockquote>
If someone reworks this text with appropriate citations, it probably belongs in the body of the article, possibly in a section called Etymology or Etymology and early usage. In my opinion, it is too long for a footnote. Also, having this material in the text would enable complete source citations in footnotes, without interrupting the flow of the text.— Finell 06:16, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
1) It allows for text from any field of study with "unit records".
2) Further, "Unit Record ..." is NOT the common name. As best I recall, Wikipedia wants common names and the common name is "punched card machines" or "... equipment". See for example "Early Punched Card Equipment, 1880 - 1951" "This article was initially written as part of the IEEE STARS program."
To checkout the "common name", just do a Google search for "unit record" and see what you find.
Cortada's "Historical Dictionary of Data Processing" has index entries for "punched card" but not "unit record". Williams "A History of ..." 1st ed has entries for "punched card" but not "unit record".
A better title would be "Punched Card Machines". That could be prefixed with "Data Processing", but the machines had more uses than just data processing. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 16:51, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 5 external links on Unit record equipment. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/productDescriptions/A-4060_IBM_Products_1940{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory.htmlWhen you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has determined that the edit contains an error somewhere. Please follow the instructions below and mark the |checked=
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Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 20:26, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
-- http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/productDescriptions contains A-4060_IBM_Products_1940.pdf -- I wasn't able to access bitsavers.org. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 06:42, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
-- www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory.html seems to have changed to http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history. But... The "acis" (it relates to Frank's new job, or at least the org. that gives him access - I've not talked to him in a long time) works, but what is displayed is the old cu/computinghistory. And the www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory.html works when the ".html" is deleted. So what's out there right now is
*[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory Columbia University Computing History] [http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html IBM Tabulators and Accounting Machines] etc...
and I've no idea as to what is going on. 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 07:50, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
Text such as this
is common throughout the various punched card articles. But Powers machines were electromechanical; they were powered by electricity. Yes, mechanical linkages were used instead of relays, but is that the sole criteria for mechanical vs electromechanical? 73.71.159.231 ( talk) 14:43, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
I made this edit to call attention to a sentence fragment.
It is ok for item lists to be e.g. simple lists of terms, names of things, etc. It is also ok for an item list to contain descriptions of events (e.g. company A acquired company B). The item list here contains some of each and is this inconsistent. In this particular case, it is not at all clear why the 80-column punched card is mentioned in the entry for 1928. Was it introduced in that year? In that case the word "introduced" or similar should appear. Or was it solely associated with The Tabulating Machine Company? Or what?
Since many entries in the list are complete sentences, with verbs, they of course all should be. Jeh ( talk) 18:56, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
The article states that "In the 1880s Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine." However, Babbage's Analytical_Engine design used punched cards for both instructions and data, in the 1830s. In the Wikipedia article on Punched_card it lists five prior designs, at least one of which was built, but still assigns the invention to Hollerith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.187.188.94 ( talk) 14:41, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
As mentioned by someone before, this article is in need of a section about the origins of the term unit record equipment and who used it first. -- 217.149.171.189 ( talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
FWIW, I've never heard the 1401, UNIVAC 1005 or any other stored-program computer referred to as unit-record equipment. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 17:24, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
Currently the Keypunch section has only a short paragraph with a {{
main|Keypunch}}
template, along with a comment that the individual units are accounted for in the main article. Is this a poster child for the use of Labeled Section Transclusion (
LST)?
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk) 13:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
In the 1960s the term keypunch girl was more common than keypunch operator. Should the Keypunch section mention the term even though it is potentially offensive? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 13:46, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Unit record equipment#Timeline claims The IBM
System/3, renting for less than $1,000 a month, the ancestor of IBM's
midrange computer product line, aka.
minicomputers,
however
DEC was using the term minicomputer well before then. --
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk) 15:38, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
The paragraph doesn’t claim first use of the term. Peter Flass ( talk) 19:07, 8 January 2024 (UTC)