Punched cards were in use as sequence control programs for automatic machines for almost a century. Charles Babbage wanted to use them to describe programs for his early computer model, the Analytical Engine, as well as use them for the input of data, rather than having operators enter the numbers directly. This idea, using punched cards to store data, was proposed even earlier, in 1832, by Ukranian Semen Nikolaevich Korsakov, who envisioned a system to store, search for, and retrieve arbitrary information. Needles in a certain configuration would be physically run over the card to determine whether a dataset adherred to a specific property, and the card retrieved if it did.
What both of these projects had in common was that they were not realised, primarily due to a lack of funding. The first person to successfully create a punch-card-based information storage and retrieval system was Herman Hollerith, who presented his Electric Tabulating System in 1884 and finished the project in 1886.
The motivation to commercialise his system was a government contract. Analysing data and preparing results for the decennial United States Census took, for its last run on data for 1880, eight years to complete, because all the work was still being done manually. Extrapolations suggested that, due to the growth in population, the 1890 census would not be completed in time before processing of the 1900 census would have to begin. Thus the U.S. government held out the prospect of a contract to the person or company who would be able to provide them with the fastest means to automate the process.
According to his own account, Herman Hollerith was inspired by observing railroad conductors, who used to encode a crude description of a passenger in the way they punched holes into their tickets, in order to prevent several people from sharing a ticket. The main element of Hollerith’s system was a tabulating machine with a card-feed mechanism which, fed with stacks of punched cards, could accumulate data and print out results automatically and accurately.
Hollerith won the contract, and the performance of his machine exceeded all expectations. The 1890 census was tabulated within only one year, with a total population count being released to the press after only six weeks. The success allowed Hollerith to found his own business, the Tabulating Machine Company, in 1896. Merging with three other corporations, it would become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corporation (CTR) in 1911, before being renamed to International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. Piggybacking on their punched card system, IBM rose to be the predominant manufacturer of large-scale business computers for most of the 20th century. The concept of storing data on punched cards was the first application of computers to information processing instead of just mathematical computations, a step whose importance cannot be overemphasised.
For an interesting and touching read on computing with punched cards in the 1970s, I recommend to you Dale Fisk’s Programming With Punched Cards, written in 2005 and set predominantly in 1973.
« Return to Part I — Prehistory
References
- Wikipedia: Herman Hollerith
- Wikipedia: Punched card
- Wikipedia: 1890 United States Census
- Wikipedia: Semen Korsakov (includes animations)
- The Census of 1900 (National Geographic, January 1900)
- Dale Fisk – Programming With Punched Cards (2005)
- Picture “Hollerith punched card” (Railroad Gazette 1895): Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
- Picture of Herman Hollerith (Charles Milton, 1888): Library of Congress, adaptation: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
