IBM was founded by an American named Hollerith who had introduced a system to classify the data obtained from the American census in the second decade of the 20th century. This was based on light and electrical circuits (and subsequently electronic circuits). It was also the origin of the term “electronic data processing.” The medium used to store the data was the famous punched card. The way in which information was encoded on a punched card was a clever invention, as were the machines for punching and then reading the punched card. Essentially, every character (or “byte”), whether it was a letter, number, or special character, was assigned a unique sequence of six holes. The two states, “hole” or “no hole,” thus formed the smallest unit of information — a binary number (0 or 1) known as a “bit” This sequence of 6 bits could be combined in 26 = 64 different ways, enabling 64 different characters to be represented (which had to include the control characters for processing). Figure 8.3.1.1 shows an extract translated from Hollerith-Mitteilungen (Hollerith News), 1913 ([IBM 83]). The reference list shows that the system had quickly gained wide acceptance also in Europe because of its ability to perform logistics tasks within a company. The “Hollerith variations” show two possible applications. The second example also directly highlights implicitly an important problem associated with data processing, i.e., data protection.