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Herman Hollerith

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.12 sec.
(person)Herman Hollerith - The promulgator of the punched card. Hollerith was born on 1860-02-29 and died on 1929-11-17. He graduated from Columbia University, NewYork, NY, USA. He joined the US Census Bureau as a statistician where he used a punched card device to help analyse the 1880 US census data. This punched card system stored data in 80 columns. This "80-column" concept has carried forward in various forms into modern applications.

In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to exploit his invention and in 1924 his firm became part of IBM. The Hollerith system was used for the 1911 UK census.

A correspondant writes:

Wasn't Hollerith's original machine first used for the 1990 US census? And I think I am right in saying that the physical layout was a 20x12 grid of round holes. The one I have seen (picture only, unfortunately, not the real thing) did not use 'columns' as such but holes were grouped into irregularly-shaped fields, such that each hole had a more-or-less independent function.


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It all began with Herman Hollerith and his punched card, which was the main user interface to computers for the first few decades that computers existed.
From the punched card to the Web: data visualization is a viable ... by Bray, Tim / Information Management Journal
The author's brief summation of the march of computing history includes Charles Babbage, the 19th-century astronomer and economist who sought to automate mathematics, just as the machines of the Industrial Age were converting factories to mass production; Herman Hollerith, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who built a punch-card tabulator for the national census in 1890; and Vannevar Bush, also of M.
ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Lohr, Steve / Washington Monthly
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