b. Hollerith's Vertical Sorter. It was not until 20 years after Babbage's death
that punch cards were finally applied to data processing. Dr. Herman Hollerith, an
engineer and statistician assigned to the Census Bureau, had watched hundreds of
clerks go through the laborious exercise of tabulating the 1880 census by hand. He
spent the 1880s working to develop a punch card system. By 1890, he had perfected
his vertical sorter, a machine-readable punch card that could handle 50 to 80 cards per
minute. With tabulating reduced to one-eighth the previous time, Hollerith's vertical
sorter was adopted as the official census machine. The 1890 census was completed in
only 3 years, for a population of 63,000,000. By contrast, it had taken 10 years to hand-
count the records of the 53,000,000 citizens participating in the 1880 census.
c. The Workings of the Vertical Sorter. The cards in Hollerith's tabulator were
the size of dollar bills. Each card had 12 rows of 20 holes to be punched for the data on
age, sex, number of children, occupation, marital status, and everything else the census
wanted to know about the U.S. population. Canvassers in the field recorded the
information on forms. These were sent to Washington, where the information was
transferred to the cards by punching the appropriate holes. Fed into another device
hooked up to the tabulating machines, the punch cards were pressed into ranks of fine
pins, one for each of the 240 items on the card. When a pin found a hole, it pushed
through to dip into a small cup of mercury, thereby completing an electromagnetic circuit
and causing an indicator on a bank of recording dials to move forward one place.
Figure 1-16. Hollerith's vertical sorter tabulated data for the 1890 census using punch
cards.
d. Facts vs Information. The raw, discrete, and unevaluated facts on age, sex,
etc., were input into the sorter, and useful information, summarizing population totals by
Congressional district, average number of children, and so forth, was compiled.
information: data arranged in useful ordered form; the output of manipulated
data.
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