November 17, 1929
Herman Hollerith Dies
Herman Hollerith dies of a heart attack at age 69. Hollerith's experience before he was 30 -- at the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Patent Office and as instructor in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- set the stage for inventing the successful card system for the 1890 census.
After this achievement, Hollerith set up his Tabulating Machine Co. in 1896. In 1911 it became the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Co., which Thomas Watson Sr. joined in 1914. A decade later it became International Business Machines.
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I began my computing career almost 40 years ago in college, with a Fortran programming course in which I punched cards for my program on an IBM Model 29 card punch exactly like the one pictured above, in a room filled with the beasts, then carried them to another room where I waited in line to feed them into a hopper in a card reader, then waited until my output was pulled from the line printer and stacked with other students' output, my name on the front page in banner(1) style. Card punches were big, slow, noisy, and finicky. In a room with 20 (if I remember correctly), up to half might be out of commission at any given time.
It was a miserable kind of routine. You would make a simple typing mistake or syntax error in your card deck somewhere, and wait 20 minutes to find out there was a problem. Over and over. Sometimes all night. And of course, one never got to actually see what the computer looked like. It was locked up and hidden in a vault somewhere.
Seems like something to drive one away from computing forever, but I (and many, many others) found it challenging and fascinating to make the computer do what we wanted it to.
Back to the point, those punch cards were encoded with "Hollerith codes", named after Herman Hollerith, who invented the scheme and unwittingly started what was to become the largest, longest lived, and arguably most successful computer and IT services company in history: IBM.
Herman, I hope you're resting peacefully.
And thanks!
