Storage: from punched cards to SSDs

The United States had to count its people every ten years, and by the 1880s the population was growing so fast that the 1890 census threatened not to be finished before the 1900 census began. The government held a contest for a better method.

Herman Hollerith won it. He recorded each person as holes in a card about the size of a dollar bill and built machines that read the holes electrically. For 1890 about 60 million cards were punched, and an operator could process some 7,000 a day, at least ten times faster than by hand. Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1895; in 1911 it merged into the group later renamed IBM.