Use of Punched Cards by Hollerith

A step in the direction of automated computing was the development of punched cards, which were first successfully used with computers in year 1890 by Herman Hollerith (left) and James Powers, who worked for  US. Census Bureau. They have developed devices that could read the information that had been drilled in the cards automatically, without the human help. Because of this, reading errors were reduced significantly, work flow increased and most importantly stacks of punched cards could be used as easily/with no trouble accessible memory of almost unlimited size. Moreover, different problems could be stored on different stacks of the cards and accessed when needed.

These great advantages were seen by the commercial companies and soon led to the development of improved punch-card using computers developed by International Business Machines (IBM), Remington (the same people that make shavers), Burroughs, and other the corporations. These computers used electro-mechanical devices in which electrical power offered mechanical motion like turning the wheels of an adding machine. Such systems included characteristics to:

•   feed in a specific number of cards automatically
•  add, multiply, and kind
•  feed out cards with punched results

As to compared to today’s machines, these computers were slow, usually processing 50-220 cards per minute, each card holding about 80 decimal characters (numbers). At the time, however, punched cards were a massive step forward. They offered a means of I/O, and memory storage on a vast scale.

For more than 50 years after their first make use of, punched card machines did most of the world’s first business computing, and considerable amount of the computing work in science.