Herman Hollerith The 1880 US census resulted in a great number of re- sponses. There were so many that it would have been im- possible to analyze all responses before the 1890 census was to be taken. Herman Hollerith had a solution. He devised a tabulating machine that read punched cards. He pro- grammed this device to collect the data from the census and sort it in just three days. It was so effective that it was used well into the 1950s when computers replaced the tab- ulating machine. Figure 1-6 shows some of the tabulators used at the Census Bureau in 1940. Hollerith’s device was a programmed device. However, it was not programmed with software. The process was hard-wired into the tabulating machine. Grace Hopper In the 1940s, Grace Murray Hopper and other pio- neering women were the programmers on the first digital computers. Software programming at that time involved rewiring the computer. These wires were organized into hardware units called wireframes. Hopper showed how the programs could be changed by rearranging the wires in the program section of the computer. She also noticed that the code could be relocated to different parts of the wireframes. The robust computer languages used today have their origins in the wireframes of Grace Hopper’s era. Hopper realized that not everyone would be able to reprogram a computer by rewiring it. She and her team created COBOL and compilers in 1959 to make it easier to program computers. Her attempt was to create a language that could be used on many different types of computers. COBOL stands for common business oriented language. As its name suggests, COBOL was a programming language written for business applications, such as collecting data and writing reports. It was one of the first programming languages that did not require the use of binary numbers for instructions. Programmers wrote human-readable in- structions using COBOL. Another piece of software called a compiler translated the COBOL code into the machine-readable instructions. COBOL was origi- nally seen as a stopgap measure, but the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. Hopper is shown in Figure 1-7 working on a UNIVAC system in the early 1960s. She was a member of the United States Navy and reached the rank of Rear Admiral. Computer Scientists Each type of computer has its own unique instruction set. Each new pro- gramming language was written to create programs for a specific computer. Many talented computer programmers wrote their own programming languages to suit the work they were doing. Most of these languages were cryptic and very hard to use. Over time, the number of computer applications increased rapidly, and languages were created to suit the applications. With the rapid growth of the computing industry, programmers were concerned with getting the project to work. They were not concerned with the readability or maintenance of their code. Another programmer looking at the code rarely could follow the logic. FYI The scientific community needed a more mathematical language than COBOL to solve its problems. FORTRAN, named for formula translator, was created to fit this need. Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com Figure 1-6. In this 1940 photograph of the Census Bureau, Herman Hollerith’s “unit tabulator” can be seen on the left. This machine processed census information on punched cards at the rate of 4800 statistics per minute. Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. 14 Introduction to Computer Science: Java Programming