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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.
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.
Toggle the table of contents. ... Hollerith suggested a card 3 by 5 + 1 ... Derived from, and compatible with, the Hollerith Code, ensuring compatibility with ...
[3] Hollerith used punched cards with round holes, 12 rows, and 24 columns. The cards measured 3 + 1 ⁄ 4 by 6 + 5 ⁄ 8 inches (83 by 168 mm). [4] His tabulator used electromechanical solenoids to increment mechanical counters. A set of spring-loaded wires were suspended over the card reader.
The 557 was a maintenance headache. In reality it was 60 little printers. The sequence was as follows: The punched card was fed from the card hopper and read by means of an electrical voltage placed onto a metal ‘Contact Roll’, timing controlled by a ‘Master Circuit Breaker, and 80 ‘Read Brushes’, one brush for each card column, and ‘Wire Contact Relays’ which decoded the data.
Alphabetic columns have a zone punch in rows 12, 11, or 0 and a digit punch in one of the rows 1-9, and can be sorted by passing some or all of the cards through the sorter twice on that column. For more details of punched card codes see punched card#IBM 80-column format and character codes.
1905: Hollerith reincorporates the Tabulating Machine Company as The Tabulating Machine Company; 1906: Hollerith Type 1 Tabulator, the first tabulator with an automatic card feed and control panel. [19] 1909: The Tabulator Limited renamed as British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM). 1910: Tabulators built by the Census Machine Shop print ...
Characters were printed using a 5 × 7 dot matrix array of wires; the device from which it derived the shape of the character was a metal plate, called the "code plate," with space for 1960 pins (35 pins times 56 printable characters). If the dot was not to be printed in a given character, the pin was machined off.