Early Life
Diebold was born in Weehawken, New Jersey. He graduated from the United States Merchant Marine Academy in 1946 and following wartime service in the Merchant Marine attended Swarthmore College in 1949 and Harvard Business School in 1951. On November 22, 1951 he married Doris Hackett, and they had a daughter Joan.
He published his first of twelve books, Automation, in 1952, which was based on a report he did while he was a student at the Harvard Business School. In it, he presented his vision of the use of programmable electronic systems for business.
Most people trace the use of the word "automation" to 1947, when Del Harder, vice president of production at Ford Motor Company, applied the concept to machine processes in automobile manufacture. The term came into broader use in Diebold's book, which used it in reference to information as well as machine processing.
Read more about this topic: John Diebold
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