Calculation Before Computers
Counting and tally marks, the abacus, Napier's logarithms and slide rules, mechanical calculators (Pascal, Leibniz), Leibniz and binary, human "computers" (people whose job was calculating), Jacquard's punched-card loom, and Hollerith's tabulators and the 1890 census.
People, gears and cards
Until the mid-20th century, a "computer" was a person: teams of human computers, often women, calculated astronomical tables, artillery trajectories and later NASA flight paths (the story told in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, 2016). Mechanical aids sped them up; punched cards let machines store and sort data, an idea that survived into the 1970s.
Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray and others, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (3rd ed., 2014); David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (2005); Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016).