Nautical Almanac
A British sea almanac run for 160 years as a calculation factory staffed by home workers, and the first scientific undertaking to be handed over to punched-card machines.
Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal, issued the first volume in 1766, covering 1767. The content was lunar distances: hour-by-hour tables of the angle between the Moon and selected stars, from which a ship's master could work out his longitude without a chronometer. The arithmetic was done by human computers working from home and paid by the lunation. Every value was computed twice by two people who were kept from meeting, and a third, the comparer, reconciled them. Double computation as error control predates the checksum by two hundred years.
In 1928 Leslie Comrie, then deputy, used punched-card equipment to compute the Moon's position from Brown's lunar theory — generally counted as the first large-scale scientific use of unit record equipment. He became superintendent in 1930 and was dismissed in 1936 for running private contracts on Admiralty machines, whereupon he founded Scientific Computing Service: the world's first commercial computing bureau, built on precisely the practice he had just been fired for.