Hollerith

Richard Hollerith was the grandson of Herman Hollerith and part of this collection documents the sale and settlement of the Herman Hollerith estate following the death of his last remaining child, Virginia.

Hollerith's 45 column punched cards are illustrated in Comrie's The application of the Hollerith Tabulating Machine to Brown's Tables of the Moon.

Nomenclature The terms punched card, punch card, and punchcard were all commonly used, as were IBM card and Hollerith card (after Herman Hollerith ).

The applications were developed by his assistant Herman Hollerith ; Hollerith invented the punch card and counter-sorter system that dominated statistical data manipulation until the 1970s.

A paper tape reader was smaller and much less expensive than hollerith card or magnetic tape readers.

Card formats The Hollerith punched cards used for the US 1890 census were blank. citation Following that, cards commonly had printing such that the row and column position of a hole could be easily seen.

Derived from, and compatible with, the Hollerith Code, ensuring compatibility with existing punched card files.

Hollerith's original system used an ad-hoc coding system for each application, with groups of holes assigned specific meanings, e.g. sex or marital status.

Hollerith was originally inspired by railroad tickets that let the conductor encode a rough description of the passenger: : "I was traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a punch photograph.

In 1911 four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were consolidated to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). citation Some accounts of the consolidation forming CTR state that only three corporations were included.

In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine.

These inventions were among the foundations of the data processing industry and Hollerith's punched cards (later used for computer input/output ) continued in use for almost a century.