History of Computers - Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith (1960-1992) was an American scientist who is most known for inventing and developing the Electric Tabulating System which used punch cards to help collect and add up info for the census bureau. He, also, was apart of the creation of IBM.

Biography

Personal Life

Herman Hollerith was born February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York to his German immigrant parents. In his childhood, he hated spelling so much that he dropped out of grade school and had to get private tutoring in order to get into college. He was accepted and further educated at Columbia University at the young age of sixteen, but he did not receive good grades. However at the age of nineteen, he graduated as a mining engineer.

Herman Hollerith

Life's Work

Herman Hollerith is most known for his work with the U.S. Census Bureau and the creation of the Electric Tabulating System; however, he had many more accomplishments such as the automatic card-feed mechanism and the first key punch (a punch operated by a keyboard). This invention began an era of semiautomatic data processing, a method that dominated the data processing world for nearly a century. In 1892 Hollerith moved his business to a two story workshop outside of Washington, DC. This building housed Hollerith's card manufacturing plant, assembly plant, and repair shop. In 1895 he named his business the Tabulating Machine Company, which soon changed to Computing Tabulating Recording Company in 1911. This company manufactured systems using the punch card method, which had its starts when Hollerith invented the Electric Tabulating System. In 1921 Hollerith left his company to Thomas Watson and retired to his farm with his family. With Thomas J. Watson as the president in 1924, the company was renamed International Business Machines, better known as [[History of Computers - IBM|IBM]. He died in 1929.

Significance

Herman Hollerith was a pioneer in the computer engineering fields. He was one of the first to use punch cards to issue commands to early computers. This would pave the way for computer technology by making programs easier to write for computers. Also, his work on the Electric Tabulating System pulled the U.S. Census Bureau out of the dark age of hand tabulation to machine collected data, which allowed the census to use the data before it became out dated. Finally, Hollerith was indirectly one of the founders of IBM, one of the largest computer technology researchers and distributors in the world.

External Links

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/hollerith.htm

http://www.info.biz.hr/Typo3/typo3_01/dummy-3.8.0/index.php?id=511

http://www.cs.cuw.edu/csc/csc175/project/remeza/history.html

References

Page Creator: Bowden Kelly