Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 - November 17, 1929) was an American businessman and the promulgator of the punch card. He was born in Buffalo, New York and graduated from Columbia University, New York, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1879 and a PhD in 1890.

Hollerith joined the US Census Bureau as a statistician where he used a punched card device (inspired by the father of a personal friend, Dr. Billings and a system used by railroad conductors, which used punching holes in various places on a passenger's ticket to identify the holder's gender, age group, etc.) to help analyse the 1890 US census data (starting June 1). This evolved, in 1928, into a punched card system that stored data in 80 columns. The "80-column" concept was later carried forward in various forms into modern applications — the majority of typewriters, professional text user interface computers, terminals and wordprocessor systems (including printers), used 80 columns as the de facto standard of printouts and screen display (until graphical user interfaces 'took over' the computer world).

On January 8, 1889 Hollerith received a patent for his electric tabulating machine . In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to exploit his invention and in 1924 his firm became part of IBM. The Hollerith system was used for the 1911 UK census.

External links:

• More on Hollerith and his original tabulator

---

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, used with permission. Update as needed.