Tabulating machine
electromechanical machine used to summarise information and perform accounting calculations
The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models were widely used for business applications such as accounting and inventory control. It spawned a class of machines, known as unit record equipment, and the data processing industry.
The term "Super Computing" was used by the New York World newspaper in 1931 to refer to a large custom-built tabulator that IBM made for Columbia University.
1890 census
The 1880 census had taken eight years to process. Since the U.S. Constitution mandates a census every ten years to apportion both congressional representatives and direct taxes among the states, a combination of larger staff and faster-recording systems was required.
In the late 1880s Herman Hollerith, inspired by conductors using holes punched in different positions on a railway ticket to record traveler details such as gender and approximate age, invented the recording of data on a machine-readable medium. Prior uses of machine-readable media had been for lists of instructions (not data) to drive programmed machines such as Jacquard looms. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards..." Hollerith used punched cards with round holes, 12 rows, and 24 columns.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tabulating machine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.