This attracted immigrant from all over the world; due to the increase in population, tabulating the US census was a difficult task because the census was tabulated by hand thus increasing the time it takes. This was when Herman Hollerith, an American inventor invented the electromechanical punched card tabulator. This invention by Hollerith marked the beginning of the era of semi-automatic data processing. Hollerith began working for the US census bureau and his device reduce the time required to process the census from 8 years to 6 years. In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company which was renamed in 1905 to The Tabulating Machine Company. To improve his tabulating machine, he invented the first automatic card feed mechanism and the first key …show more content…
The first generation of computers ranged from 1940 – 1956. These computers were mainly made up of vacuum tubes. According to some scholars, the ENIAC was the world’s first all-electronic computer but this theory was disproved by the courts. However, the ENIAC was the first electronic general purpose computer and the first ever computer to be built with vacuum tubes. ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania and was used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States. It was made up of 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. This device was the size of a