Advantages of Hollerith's Device

The use of electricity as the driving force made Hollerith's tabulator attractive. Not only did the electric counter increase the speed and efficiency of the compilation of data, but it also overcame the problem that cog and gear intensive machines had. An electric relay system was much less likely to encounter design problems. Due to the crude craftsmanship of some metal components, the highly mechanical machines often did not run smoothly.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage, who is considered the Father of Modern Computing for conceiving the Analytic Engine, discovered this problem forty years earlier. Babbage's planned to power his machine, which included all of the basic components of the modern computer -- a memory, a computational processor, and input/output protocol(web), -- with a steam locomotive engine and mechanical gears. Due to the lack of specificity in the manufacturing these components, the needs of his design were beyond what technology at the time could offer. Therefore, the Analytic Engine was never completed.¹

A portion of the Difference Engine, the predecessor to the Analytic Engine

In addition to electricity, the hole punch system of the tabulation machine provided another interesting feature relating to the future design of computers. The hole punch system is analogous to the binary system of ones and zeros in digital data storage. A hole could be considered to represent a one, while the absence of a hole could be considered to represent a zero.

Also, the use of continuous strip is analogous to tape storage devices, which eariler computers were heavily based on and are still used to store large amounts of data. Hollerith encountered difficulties with the continuous strip design: physical damage, such as a rip, in any portion of the single strip affected the entire tape; it was difficult to go back and correct data on a single strip; it was difficult to find a single piece or type of data: and it was impossible to sort and resort data in a sensical way. Ironically, IBM, the company that would usurp Hollerith's own company, created random access storage system, a system currently used that stores information anywhere on a spinning disc, to correct the disadvantages of the single strip storage devices. Hollerith's solution to the problems of the single strip was to replace the single strip with small cards made of stiff paper, similar to the Jacquard cards.²