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Herman Hollerith's punched-card machines sped up the 1890 US census, after the 1880 count had taken about eight years to process by hand. Each person's details were punched as holes in a card. Where there was a hole, a metal pin passed through it into a cup of mercury, closing an electrical circuit and moving a counter on by one.

Herman Hollerith, patented 1889, deployed 1890

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The story behind the card

Hollerith, a young engineer who had worked on the 1880 census, said the idea came partly from railway conductors, who punched tickets in set places to record a passenger's features, such as hair colour. His machines let clerks count and sort millions of cards: how many people of a given age, sex or birthplace lived in each area. The 1890 population total was ready far sooner, although the full reports still took years. In 1896 he founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 was combined with three other firms into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, renamed International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. Punched cards remained a standard way to feed data into computers until the 1970s.

Türkçe oku
Herman Hollerith'in delikli kart makineleri 1890 ABD nüfus sayımını büyük ölçüde hızlandırdı; 1880 sayımının sonuçlarını elle işlemek sekiz yıl kadar sürmüştü. Her kişinin bilgileri bir karta delik olarak işleniyordu. Delik olan yerde metal bir iğne karttan geçip cıva dolu küçük bir kaba batıyor, devreyi tamamlıyor ve sayacı bir ilerletiyordu.

1880 sayımında da çalışmış genç bir mühendis olan Hollerith, fikrin kısmen tren kondüktörlerinden geldiğini anlatırdı: Kondüktörler bileti belirli yerlerinden delerek yolcunun saç rengi gibi özelliklerini kaydediyordu. Hollerith'in makineleri sayesinde memurlar milyonlarca kartı sayıp ayırabiliyor, örneğin hangi bölgede belli bir yaşta, cinsiyette ya da doğum yerinden kaç kişi yaşadığını bulabiliyordu. 1890'da toplam nüfus çok daha çabuk açıklandı; ayrıntılı raporların tamamlanması yine de yıllar sürdü. Hollerith 1896'da Tabulating Machine Company'yi kurdu. Bu şirket 1911'de üç başka firmayla birleştirilerek Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company adını aldı; 1924'te adı International Business Machines, yani IBM oldu. Delikli kartlar 1970'lere kadar bilgisayarlara veri girmenin standart yollarından biri olarak kaldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Herman Hollerith
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