"Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American businessman, inventor, and statistician who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to ...
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assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1889, marks the beginning of the era of semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century. He was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company that was amalgamated (via stock acquisition) in 1911 with three other companies to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which was renamed IBM in 1924. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing." - (en.wikipedia.org 31.01.2020)