In one of my courses, the professor managed to waste a whole class session griping about how hard it is to produce data. Working with the data is easy compared to getting it and putting it into the computer. It was during that session that I decided that I was in the right industry for me. I'm here to talk about data entry, and the web. But I'm going to start with a brief history of data entry, because there are a few interesting points I'd like to make.
Data entry starts with computers, and computers compute.
They exist to process data and without data computers don't do anything. Business computing started in the 1890's with the tabulating machines of Herman Hollerith. You might have heard of them. His machine counted holes in punched cards, and the whole purpose of that was to speed up the Census of 1890. Hollerith's machine did in months what used to take years.