We blame the population for lots of things! For once let me give some praise! Do you know that the growth of population and the counting of population or Census is the root reason for the development and final invention of a product which is one of the most useful devices in the world today!? Read on!
In a book called Algorithms to live by; the computer science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griggiths; the authors narrate about the growing population of US and the huge task of compiling and tabulating the data! The whole task of census is done every ten years and there reached a situation in which the data collected for the census in 1880 was so much that the compiling and indexing was completed only in 1888 just in time for the next census!
It had become a mind-numbingly boring, monotonous, error-prone, clerical exercise of a magnitude rarely seen! A simple error and you can bid the census good bye! Since the population was evidently continuing to grow at a rapid pace, those with sufficient imagination could foresee that processing the 1890 census would be gruesome indeed without some change in procedure!
Trust a doctor to come to rescue! It was John Shaw Billings, a physician assigned to assist the Census Office with compiling health statistics who had closely observed the immense tabulation efforts required to deal with the raw data of 1880. He expressed his concerns to a young mechanical engineer assisting with the census, Herman Hollerith, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Mines and fresh to innovate!
The technological solutions devised by Hollerith involved a suite of mechanical and electrical devices. The first crucial innovation was to translate data on handwritten census tally sheets to patterns of holes punched in cards.
A hole (please read it separately!!) is thus punched corresponding to person, then a hole according as person is a male or female, another recording whether native or foreign born, another either white or Colored (colorful would have been better!)
This process required developing special machinery to ensure that holes could be punched with accuracy and efficiency which Hollerith then devised to “read” the card, by probing the card with pins, so that only where there was a hole would the pin pass through the card to make an electrical connection, resulting in an advance of the appropriate counter!
For example, if a card for a white male farmer passed through the machine, a counter for each of these categories would be increased by one. The card was made sturdy enough to allow passage through the card reading machine multiple times, for counting different categories or checking results!
The count proceeded so rapidly that the state-by-state numbers needed for congressional apportionment were certified before the end of November 1890!
After his census success, Hollerith went into business selling this technology. The company he founded would, after he retired, become this company which led the way in perfecting card technology for recording and tabulating large sets of data for a variety of purposes!
By the 1930s, many businesses were using cards for record-keeping procedures, such as payroll and inventory. Some data-intensive scientists, especially astronomers, were also finding the cards convenient. The company by then had standardized an 80-column card and had developed keypunch machines that would change little for decades!
Card processing served as a scaffolding for vastly more rapid and space-efficient purely electronic computers that now dominate, with little evidence remaining of the old regime! The name of the company? International Business Machines or as we all know it; IBM!
Interesting piece of history of card scaffolding and computer! Another bit of history is Kanchan Chaudhary Bhattacharya who was the second woman officer in Indian Police Service (IPS) in India, the first being Kiran Bedi! Incidentally her younger sister Kavita Chaudhary under her sister’s ‘scaffolding’ directed and starred in series called Udaan based on the life of Kanchan which was inspirational to many girls of that time! We lost her the other day. Heartfelt condolences to Kavita Ji; You will be missed…
Heartfelt condolences; om shanti…
Now shut down the card punch machine, I mean the computer and sleep!
Good Night!
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