Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Herman Hollerith's tabulators cut processing of the United States census from years of hand counting to months. The figure is taken from US Census Bureau, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

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A punched card machine saved the 1890 census

Herman Hollerith's tabulators cut processing of the United States census from years of hand counting to months The 1880 count took about eight years to process, and officials feared the next one would take longer than the decade it described. Hollerith's machine pressed pins through holes in cards, closing circuits that incremented counters for each category. His company later merged into the firm that became IBM. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

US Census Bureau

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History trivia Technology trivia

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The Jacquard loom used punched cards to automate intricate fabric weavingJoseph Marie Jacquard invented interchangeable punched card controls for textile machinery in 1804 Paper tape stored programs as rows of holesTeletypes and early minicomputers read tape punched with eight data channels and a clocking sprocket hole Hamming codes find and fix a single bad bitRichard Hamming's 1950 scheme adds overlapping parity bits so a receiver can locate one flipped bit and repair it IBM's System 360 was a family of compatible machinesLaunched in 1964, it let customers move a program from a small computer to a large one without rewriting it The first stored program ran on the Manchester BabyIn June 1948 a small experimental machine executed 52 instructions held in a cathode ray tube memory Dijkstra worked out shortest paths in twenty minutesEdsger Dijkstra designed his graph routing method in 1956 at a cafe table, without pen or paper

Tags: computing-history, census, punched-cards

A punched card machine saved the 1890 census: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Herman Hollerith's tabulators cut processing of the United States census from years of hand counting to months. The figure is taken from US Census Bureau, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.