This date in 1890: The Start of the Mainframe Computer Business

Wired News today points out that on June 1, 1890, the U.S. Census bureau for the first time used a tabulating machine to mechanically compute census statistics. In many ways, it marked the debut of the mainframe computer. Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company became a part of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911.

In May of 1914, C-T-R hired Thomas Watson to run the company, and Watson turned it into IBM. I wrote a book about Watson, and it includes this passage about his early encounters with Hollerith (and C-T-R's biggest shareholder, George Fairchild).

Over the following few weeks, Watson got to know two men who, from Watson's point of view, were the business equivalent of a couple of impacted molars. Herman Hollerith and George Fairchild would obstruct Watson's plans and shackle his ambition for nearly a decade, and there was no way to get rid of either of them. Of the two, Hollerith was the more consistently miserable. A brilliant, glowering German with a thick mustache, Hollerith invented the tabulating machine. He was a leap-year baby -- born on February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, N.Y. -- and a prodigy. At the age of 15, Hollerith entered college; at 19, he got a graduate degree in engineering from Columbia University. He went to work for the U.S. Census Bureau as a statistician, helping count the 1880 census -- a laborious task done by hand. While there, a manager suggested that there ought to be a machine that could count the population more quickly. Hollerith agreed and thought he could build one. Hollerith took a position teaching mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and kept working on his machine, borrowing ideas from automatic looms and from the way railroad conductors punched tickets to record information about a passenger -- certain punches for light hair or big nose, and so on. In 1884, Hollerith applied for a patent on tabulating machine and punch card technology. He took his invention back to the government and won a contract to build fifty of them for the 1890 U.S. census, which turned into Hollerith's breakthrough. The Census Bureau expected it would take two years to hand-count and analyze the 1890 population of 62,622,250. Hollerith's machines did it in three months, saving $5 million. Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Co. in Washington, D.C., and won census contracts in Canada, Norway, and Australia. For the 1900 U.S. census, Hollerith presented a steep bill to the Census bureau, which then decided Hollerith was too pricey. It assigned one of its own engineers, James Powers, to create an alternative tabulating machine. Powers turned into Hollerith's chief competitor, in 1911 launching the Powers Tabulating Machine Company -- a seed of a company that in various forms would compete against Watson's IBM for more than 40 years.