Chapter 10 Thoughts

This is the post covering my thoughts about Chapter 10 of the textbook. Chapter 10 focused on the life of Herman Hollerith and the circumstances that lead to his invention of automatic tabulating machines and sorters that used punched cards. This chapter provides interesting insight into the importance of data handling machines to the modern world. From today's perspective, when computers are commonplace, it's sometimes difficult to imagine just how daunting processing large amounts of data can be. However, the issue with the U.S. Census that led to Hollerith's invention makes the arduousness of the task clear. As the U.S. population rapidly increased, the number of clerks needed to process the data increased exponentially. This eventually led to the point where it was simply impossible to process the data by hand in the given amount of time. It's interesting to contemplate what would have occurred if Hollerith hadn't invented his machines. It seems likely that the government would have been forced to cut down on census analysis, losing important population information in the process. It also seems likely that the practice of hiring hundreds of clerks to handle data manually would have become as deeply entrenched in the U.S. as it was throughout Europe. This might have delayed the switch to information handling machines, which might have delayed the computer revolution itself.