The first government bureau to use punch cards to collect and tabulate data was the U.S. Census Office (today’s U.S. Census Bureau), for the 1890 United States census.

Herman Hollerith’s punched-card tabulating system was adopted after the Census Office ran a competition in the late 1880s to find a faster way to process population statistics, and his machines dramatically reduced the time needed compared with the 1880 census. Earlier experimental uses of Hollerith-style punched cards for public health “vital statistics” helped inspire this work, but the first large-scale, official government bureau deployment was the 1890 U.S. federal census.

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