Punch cards for mechanical loom

Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) developed the first punched card to control a loom in 1805. The principle was simple: many punched cards were lined up, a needle scanned the individual rows, where it hits a hole, there is a change, where there is none, nothing changes. This was the basis of the binary code.
During a census in the USA in 1890, Hermann Hollerith (1860-1929) found a solution for the time-consuming census. He used the punched card to store information and also developed a device to punch and read the cards - the Hollerith machine.