Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9 The Hollerith tabulating machine, 1890s.
and compared. Perhaps the largest scale example of such endeavours
is the Census, the ten-yearly enumeration of a country's population.
The first censuses took place in the United States in
1790
and in
Britain in
, in America at least, the problem of gather-
ing and collating the large amount of information required was
proving insurmountable, at least by the means then available. These
were the conditions that provoked the development of the tabulat-
ing machine, one of the major technical developments on the way
to the modern electronic computer. A young engineer, Herman
Hollerith, designed a system using punched cards similar to the sort
used by the Jacquard Loom and proposed by Charles Babbage for his
Analytical Engine. Each person was represented by a card. Facts
about them were noted by holes punched in the card. The power
of Hollerith's system was that the information could be tabulated
and sorted and counted mechanically. Complex concatenated sorts
could be undertaken, cross-tabulating different data. Hollerith's
tabulating machine is an exemplary product of the disciplinary,
1801
. By
1880
