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Hollerith constants, named in honor of Herman Hollerith, were used in early FORTRAN programs to allow manipulation of character data. Early FORTRAN had no CHARACTER data type , only numeric types. In order to perform character manipulation, characters needed to be placed into numeric variables using Hollerith constants.
Hollerith started his own business as The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, specializing in punched card data processing equipment. [10] In 1896 he incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company. In that year he introduced the Hollerith Integrating Tabulator, which could add numbers coded on punched cards, not just count the number of holes.
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) 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.
The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) was a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed some 200 "bombes", machines used at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine ciphers.
A 12-row/80-column IBM punched card from the mid-twentieth century. A punched card (also punch card [1] or punched-card [2]) is a piece of card stock that stores digital data using punched holes.
In the first commercial electronic data processing Hollerith machines were used to compile the data accumulated in the 1890 U.S. Census of population. [4] Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company merged with two other firms to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed IBM. The punch-card and tabulation machine business ...
A single program deck, with individual subroutines marked. The markings show the effects of editing, as cards are replaced or reordered. Many early programming languages, including FORTRAN, COBOL and the various IBM assembler languages, used only the first 72 columns of a card – a tradition that traces back to the IBM 711 card reader used on the IBM 704/709/7090/7094 series (especially the ...
Jacquard cards were said to be stamped or cut, rather than punched. The first Jacquard cards were stamped by hand, sometimes using a guide plate. An improvement involved placing the card between two perforated metal plates, hinged together, inserting punches according to the desired pattern, and then passing the assembly through a press to cut the card.