A Brief History of Analytics

In the beginning

Someone, somewhere, somehow, made one or more marks of some sort on or in some material representing information the person had in mind.
The mark, or marks, being information encoded in some persistent media, was data.
If at some future time someone saw the mark(s) and was able to interpret it, i.e. see and decode the information it contained, they would be able to acquire/inherit the information the information known to the markmaker.
The marks are data.
Reading the marks and contemplating the information is analysis; insofar as the information is sourced from the data this is commonly called data analysis.

Later...

Clever people developed ways to organize information so that it could form collections of individual bits about entities of interest.

For our purposes, the invention of punched cards, with the holes in the cards encoding specific data about the cards' subjects, is an inflection point in the history of analytics.

1890

Herman Hollerith's Census Tabulator, for which he received a US patent and a PhD from Columbia University was used in the analysis of the 1890 US census by automatically detecting punch cards' holes, collecting, collating, and counting the cards' data.

Mid-20th Century

Computer-assisted data analysis

Electronic computers, once invented, became mainstays of automatic data processing for those institutions that could afford them. Although expensive, and requiring highly skilled people to operate them, their advantages in speed and volume of data processing made them very attractive, and eventually essential to, modern organizations.

1974

Punch cards remained a dominant form of data storage. My first exposure to compi