Excerpt:
The Census Bureau's solution was to have a competition to find a new method by which the census could be tabulated. Herman Hollerith entered and won this competition. With his victory, not only did Hollerith make it possible to complete the census in a reasonable time frame, but his methods, which were used well into the 1960s, offered a foundation for the future collection of all types of data1. With his invention Hollerith allowed for the creation of one of the most dominant corporations of the computer age and secured his place in history as the father of information processing.
Annotation:
Account of Hollerith's life, particularly with regards to his development of a tabulating machine for the US Census Bureau. Contains brief listings of bibliographical and online resources.