Also, Lady Lovelace's understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer.
The steam-powered Engine may seem primitive by today's standards, but it outlined the basic elements of a modern general-purpose computer and was a breakthrough concept. Consisting of over fifty-thousand components, the basic design of the Analytical Engine included input devices in the form of perforated cards that contained operating instructions and a "store" for memory of a thousand numbers of up to fifty decimal digits long. It also contained a "mill" with a control unit that allowed processing instructions in any sequence, and output devices to produce printed results. Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the machine's instructions from the Jacquard loom. The loom used punched boards that controlled the patterns to be woven. .
In 1889, an American inventor, Herman Hollerith, also applied the loom concept to computing. His first task was to find a faster way to compute the U.S. census. The previous census had taken nearly seven years to count and with a constantly growing population, they feared it would take ten years to count the latest census. Hollerith's method used cards to store data information, which he fed into a machine that compiled the results. Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as eighty variables could be stored on a single card. Instead of ten years, census takers had their results in just six weeks. The punch cards also served as a storage method for data and they helped reduce computational errors. Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which later became IBM. Both business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.