Not so long ago, 'punching the clock' was a daily routine for millions of workers the world over.

It might be supposed that the phrase refers to acts of violence carried out against bedside clocks that persist in delivering unwelcome news to the slumbering occupants of the beds they sit beside. In fact no aggressive behaviour was involved.

To punch the clock merely meant inserting a named card into a timekeeping machine at one's place of work. The card would be stamped with the time of arrival, and again later in the day with the time of departure, allowing wages clerks to make up pay packets according to the actual number of hours worked.

It is doubtful whether many, or indeed any, of the workers who carried out this daily routine paused to consider the connection between clocking on and the company that transformed working lives by introducing the world to the power and potential of the computer. But the link was there.

As in the case of many of the world's inventions it is not altogether clear who was the first person to create a time clock - a device by which workers' hours of attendance could be accurately and automatically recorded. In Scotland, Dr Alexander Dey invented a dial recorder for this purpose in 1888, but it was not until 1992 that the first model went into production.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Willard Bundy, a jeweller from Auburn, New York, seems to invented a similar time recorder as early as 1885, although a patent was not issued until 1888. Willard and his brother Harlow set up the Bundy Manufacturing Company in 1889 and the first model was rolled out in 1890.

Both firms operated in competition for a number of years. Alexander Dey's younger brother John crossed the Atlantic to set up an arm of the Dey time clock manufacturing company in Syracuse, New York, in 1893; meanwhile, and also in 1893, the British Bundy Clock Company started in business on the other side of the herring pond.

By the turn of the century, things were moving fast in the time clock industry. A number of other competitors had emerged, each marketing its own version of the clocking-on device. In 1900, the Bundy Manufacturing Company merged with Willard & Frick of Rochester, N.Y., and the Standard Time Stamp Company, to form the International Time Recording Company (ITR). In 1907, the American arm of the Dey Time Register Company was taken over by ITR, putting an end to the competition between Bundy and Dey on that side of the Atlantic. It was not until 1924 that Dey's British operation would be swallowed up by the British arm of ITR.

In 1911 ITR merged with the Computing Scale Company (which had a great deal more to do with scales than computing) and the Tabulating Machine Company to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R.

Finally, in 1924, C-T-R changed its name to International Business Machines, the name it retains to this day. In 1981, some ninety years after Alexander Dey and Willard and Harlow Bundy started up in business, the company that they helped to found produced the IBM Personal Computer, and in the process revolutionised just about every aspect of modern life.