Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to summarize information and, later, to assist in accounting. His punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century. Hollerith founded a company that was amalgamated in 1911 with several others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, renamed International Business Machines, or IBM, in 1924.