A Brief History of Analytics

In the beginning

someone, somewhere, somehow, made a mark of some sort that was later seen and interpreted, by theirself or someone else. The mark was data. The perception and interpretation of it was 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