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Turtle banana posts banana fluffy turtle sanity ranking at the door hamster spam hamster statistics fluffy turtle hamster eat sanity from turtle at door lol postcounts activity increase SPIDERWEB! GHAUHGUHAUHGUHAUHGBLGH!

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It's so late it's early, and I'm tired as hell.

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Today's statistics are dedicated to the memory of Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) notable inventor and statistician, who died 77 years ago.

Hollerith (much like me :P ) was born in New York, to German parents. After graduating as an Engineer of Mining, he took a job with the US Census Bureau, where he dealt with statistical data of the steel industry.

Later, he spent his time researching a new technology to gather census data more efficiently. Inspired by a the punch-card mechanism of an automatic weaving loom (the Jacquard loom), he built a machine that would store data as a series of holes which would be read by electric contacts, and sorted and counted automatically.

The gain in efficiency was immense. The US Census of 1880, counting 50 million residents, had taken seven years to evaluate. The census of 1890 - the first one using Hollerith's tabulating machine - took only 2.5 years to tabulate 62 million people.
Having gained renown from the government contract, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (today known as IBM), and sold (or rather leased) his appliances to many census bureaus and insurance companies world-wide.

His key invention - the punch-card as a means of writing, storing and processing data automatically - influenced the next century of computing technology. Programs were first hard-wired into computer systems and read their data from stacks of punch-cards; later, following the introduction of programming languages, assemblers and compilers, the programs were written on punch-cards themselves.

FORTRAN is one example for a language that was written almost exclusively on punch-cards, and whose fixed-form syntax still reflects that.

Since then, punch-cards as a means of storage have been replaced by hard-drives, floppy disks, CDs and eventually Flash memory - and nobody's really written them with a key-puncher since the rise of terminals, command lines and text editors. But as storage devices go, they are about the only one that would survive being folded in half and falling from a third-floor window onto a big magnet. And also, they make excellent note cards.

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The PHP script I wrote back in February 2005 has also been updated and rewritten many times - from its early days of generating a comma-separated file that went into an excel table, to generating an SQL file that went into a database, to updating the database directly. These days, so much of it is automated that I hardly need to lift a finger in operating it - notice that I am not even making this post today.

A lot has changed since the beginning, but it originally started out as merely a primitive machine that listed member numbers and displayed names automatically, as opposed to dedicated people killing hours of their time doing it.
The first Spiderweb census took a year. These days, we're down to about 3-4 hours - every month. All in all, a nice evolution of technology. And now, back to EndeavorBot!

--Aran

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Originally written by Stugri-La:

My hands, or rather my fingers, are rather exceptional. My hands are often said to be spider-like, as the palms are small but the fingers exceptionally long and thin, with larger knuckles. As these knuckles make it very difficult to remove rings and the like, my first marriage will likely be my last. :P

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Originally written by Drew:

"Fixed your too long didn't read"

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Originally written by Ash Lael:

Aran is Harry Potter's blond-haired brother, I swear.

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Originally written by Electorael:

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Rich dilettante

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FYTLDR

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