The Hollerith Tabulating Machine Company was incorporated in 1896, after Herman Hollerith invented the punch card and the tabulating machine that read the holes in the card.
In 1911 it was merged with two other data-processing technology companies and was called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, changed in 1924 to IBM. In the 1950s the company developed an electronic way to read the punch cards, this was the beginning of modern computing.
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I seem to remember Jacquard invented the punchcard, to be used in his automated looms, which must have been earlier than computing.
ReplyDeleteJacquard invented the punch card to control looms, then Hollerith adapted the concept for data tabulation.
ReplyDeleteMy programming professor in engineering school (1980) was an older guy who referred to punch cards as "Hollerith cards".
Which wasn't mentioned in the explanations I read about Hollerith. But inventions rarely appear out of thin air, it usually seems to be an adaptation of something else in an unrelated field.
ReplyDeleteRegarding punch cards, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the main museum in St. Etienne; it's kind of the French version of Birmingham - Black Country, not Alabama - in that there was a lot of manufacturing went on there. Looms, bicycles, armaments, etc. in the 1800s. D.
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