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Background: IBM, Dehomag, and the Hollerith Punch Card System In the early 20th century, International Business Machines (IBM) emerged as a leader in data processing technology thanks to a revolutionary invention: the Hollerith punched-card system. Originally devised by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. Census, this electromechanical system encoded information as holes punched in cards and could sort and tabulate thousands of records with unprecedented speed. By the 1930s, IBM’s punch card machines – consisting of keypunches to input data, tabulators to aggregate it, and sorters to organize the cards – were the state-of-the-art method for handling large data sets.…