The Obituary
The punched card began as a way to control looms in the 1700s and grew into the backbone of mechanized data. Herman Hollerith adapted the idea for the 1890 US Census, encoding each person as holes in a card and reading them electrically, turning a count that once took years into one of months. His firm became part of IBM, whose 80-column card ruled payrolls, censuses, and early computers for decades. To program or pay or be counted was to feed cards into a machine. Magnetic tape, disks, and screen terminals made the holes unnecessary, and by the 1980s the card had mostly vanished.
Worth remembering
- Herman Hollerith's punched-card tabulator cut the 1890 US Census count from years to months.
- The IBM 80-column card defined the 'do not fold, spindle, or mutilate' era of bureaucracy.
Sources
- Punched cards used from looms (c.1725) to Hollerith's 1890 census tabulator Wikipedia
- Hollerith's tabulating company became part of IBM Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.