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Concept
Herman Hollerith
Summary
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
Hollerith founded a company that was amalgamated in 1911 with several other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1924, the company was renamed "International Business Machines" (IBM) and became one of the largest and most successful companies of the 20th century. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing.
Herman Hollerith was the son of German immigrant Georg Hollerith, a school teacher from Großfischlingen, Rhineland-Palatinate. He was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, where he also spent his early childhood. He entered the City College of New York in 1875, graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with an Engineer of Mines degree in 1879 at age 19, and, in 1890, earned a Doctor of Philosophy based on his development of the tabulating system. In 1882, Hollerith joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he taught mechanical engineering and conducted his first experiments with punched cards. He eventually moved to Washington, D.C., living in Georgetown with a home on 29th Street and a business building at 31st Street and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where today there is a commemorative plaque installed by IBM. He died in Washington, D.C., at age 69 of a heart attack.
Unit record equipment
At the suggestion of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to increment a counter, recording information. A key idea was that a datum could be recorded by the presence or absence of a hole at a specific location on a card.
Official source
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