In the 1880s, a punched card machine counted a nation (United States). By the 1880 U.S. Census, counting America’s population by hand took nearly a decade. With rapid population growth, officials feared the next census would be outdated before it was completed. Engineer Herman Hollerith developed an electromechanical tabulating system using punched cards to represent demographic data. Holes in specific positions encoded information such as age, gender, and occupation. For the 1890 Census, his ma