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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 1890 tabulating machine with sorting box. [a] Hollerith punched card. The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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 ...