Early Electronichardwareinformation systems

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine

1860 – 1929U.S.AContribution: 1889

Introduction

Herman Hollerith was an American inventor and businessman known for developing a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. This development was critical in the processing of data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Hollerith's company eventually became part of what is now IBM.

Key Achievement

Widely regarded as the father of modern machine data processing, his invention of the punched card tabulating machine marked the beginning of the era of semiautomatic data processing systems

Biography

Herman Hollerith 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.

Did You Know?

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.