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In the late 1880s, Herman Hollerith emerged as a pivotal figure in punch card programming. Working on the U.S. Census Bureau's data collection, he recognized the inefficiency of manual tallying during the population count. To counter the impending delay of the 1890 Census, Hollerith developed a punch card system that utilized electricity to read, count, and sort data, significantly accelerating the census process.
His punch cards were designed to match the size of a dollar bill, making them practical for storage and handling. As a result of Hollerith's success, he founded a company in 1896 to apply this innovative system in various industries. Eventually, his enterprise merged to become IBM, a corporation that would dominate the early data processing landscape.