From the early 20th century into the 1970s, Americans used punched cards to enter data onto tabulating equipment and then electronic computers. This early key-operated punch is based on patents of the ...

We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous ...

On June 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith applied for US patent #395,781 for his punch card counting machine, a device considered to be among the foundations of the modern information processing industry and ...

Statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith became known as the father of modern automatic computation for his electric tabulating system, which revolutionized the US census. He was recruited to work ...

Cards like these were used widely to input and store data for specialised data processing equipment from about 1890 to about 2000 - they may still be in use on some large computers. This one was ...

Today is Census Day, with the ability to submit information online and the use of sophisticated database technology to derive statistics from raw counts. But for more than a century, punch card ...