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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.
The Powers/Remington Rand card format was initially the same as Hollerith's; 45 columns and round holes. In 1930, Remington Rand leap-frogged IBM's 80 column format from 1928 by coding two characters in each of the 45 columns – producing what is now commonly called the 90-column card. [31]: 142 There are two sets of six rows across each card ...
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.
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 ...
Replica of Hollerith tabulating machine with sorting box, circa 1890. The "sorting box" was an adjunct to, and controlled by, the tabulator. The "sorter", an independent machine, was a later development. [15] 1884: Herman Hollerith files a patent application titled "Art of Compiling Statistics"; granted U.S. patent 395,782 on January 8, 1889.
A code point is a value or position of a character in a coded character set. [10] A code space is the range of numerical values spanned by a coded character set. [10] [12] A code unit is the minimum bit combination that can represent a character in a character encoding (in computer science terms, it is the word size of the character encoding).
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 ...
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.