Hollerith's Electromechanical Tabulator
The first of Kurzweil's Five Paradigms of Computing.
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →Herman Hollerith invented an electromechanical tabulating machine using punch cards to process the 1890 US Census. It was the first time an electrical machine was used to process data on a massive scale, completing a task that previously took nearly a decade in just two years.
Verified Facts
- Ray Kurzweil places this machine at the absolute starting point of his famous "Law of Accelerating Returns" graph, marking the beginning of the "Electromechanical" paradigm.
- Hollerith's company eventually merged with several others in 1911 to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which was later renamed IBM.
- The punch card format he established was so ubiquitous that IBM punch cards remained the industry standard for data entry well into the 1970s.