What became of the Hollerith Technology?
The Hollerith Technology has been tainted with a negative bent because of its devastating use in the holocaust; it makes its positive use in census taking pale in comparison. The machine, though was simply a machine: it could have been used just as easily in helping people choose vocations, or deciding where to allot resources instead of in assignment to brutal deaths. The technology used became the basis of our keypunch machines and card-readers which by the 50s and 60s led to computer programming and statistical analysis. That technology led to modern computer processing and what once took weeks or months now takes seconds. Even as late as 1981, as a graduate student, we still used large main frames which took up a whole room and keypunched data for our research, a technology dating back to Hollerith. The most essential lesson from the use of the Hollerith Machine is not the machine itself, but the motive and means for which the machine is used. The evil we associate with the machine
