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Zac Ioannidis

Herman Holleriths Tabulating Machine and its impact in the History of Computing
The electrical tabulating machine created by Herman Hollerith is considered by many to be among the earliest computers and envisages the premier form of automatic data processing. Although used in smaller scale in the mid 1880s in hospitals and the army, its use in the 1890 US Census revolutionized the way large data was handled, accessed and ltered. The 1890 Census was a very important one for the United States, since the Seats in the House of Representatives were to be apportioned, and this procedure relied heavily on the census information, as every states representatives were determined based on its population. The Census Bureau faced a difcult challenge since the previous tallying system was deemed inefcient and nonscalable for the boom in population during the previous decade, due to border expansion and immigration. Meanwhile, Herman Hollerith, an engineering graduate from Columbia University, started developing a prototype machine to handle the sorting of large amounts of data. Hollerith was inspired by the punch cards in the Jacquard loom as well as the punch photographs utilized by train conductors to provide a brief description of the passengers physical attributes. The Electrical Tabulating Machine as it was called, proved to be particularly efcient and was declared be the method used in the next head count. The system consisted of three components, a pantograph punch, a tabulator and a sorter. Information was punched on the card, in one of the available positions and was then placed on a sensory mechanism connected to the tabulator which had steel spring-loaded pins[0] for each position on the punch card. Where there were holes, the pins would connect with a bed of mercury and affect an electrical contact[1]. Then, one of the forty dials (capable of counting up to 9,999[2]) on the tabulator matching a specic eld on the punch card would increase and the lid of a box would pop open to allow the storage of the cards. The beauty of this system was that the punch cards were essentially binary systems, representing crude binary trees, with the absence or not of holes equating to logical zero or ones respectively. This proved to be advantageous when transferring the data into digital computers[3]. Another remarkable feat of the Hollerith Machine was its ability to not only count the population but also the correlation of the data[4] contained among the 40 distinct elds in the punch cards. This proved to be a huge step forwards for statistics and looking back we can pinpoint Hollerith as the forerunner of large scale data processing. His machine also started the trend of computers being used outside of experimental, scientic environments in widespread, practical, real-world problems. In fact, the Electrical Tabulator was licensed and used for censi in Austria, Canada, Russia[5] and variations of it were utilized in freight shipments, commercial bookkeeping and industrial accounting. Few people disrupted the course of technology the way Herman Hollerith and his tabulator did. As well as undertaking the seemingly impossible task that was the 1890 US Census and delivering results much sooner than expected, he also saved the government the equivalent of $1 billion (in 1990 dollars)[6,7]. Furthermore, his paradigm showed the rest of the world that using technology for large projects was much more cost-efcient and came with tangible benets. This of course led to the founding of technical, solution engineering companies, aimed towards both the private and public sectors. One such company was IBM, created from a merge between three others, with one being Holleriths. It is truly amazing to think that the whole technological ecosystem of today and the way with which we perceive computers and technology could have been instigated from a single machine.

Zac Ioannidis

[0]: http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/440-herman-hollerith.html?start=1 [1]: http://www.thocp.net/hardware/tabulating_machine.htm#9 [2]: The Electrical Tabulating Machine, Herman Hollerith, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1894), pp. 678-689 [3]: http://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Hollerith.htm [4]: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hh/index.html [5]: http://www..edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computing [6]: U.S. Census Bureau, 100 Years of Data Processing: The Punchcard Century (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1991), 5-6. [7]: The Creation and Destruction of the 1890 Federal Census, Robert L. Dorman, The American Archivist, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Fall-Winter, 2008), pp. 350-383

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Hollerith Statistical Technique, Irving V. Sollins, Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1932), pp 43-51 http://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.html http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census-1.html Holleriths Electric Tabulating Machine, The Railroad Gazette, April 19, 1805 http://www.memory.loc.gov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith http://mntl.illinois.edu/docs/holonyak.pdf http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-themodern-computer/ http://www..edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computing http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hollerith.html

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