Before paper was used for storing data, it had been used in several applications for storing instructions to specify a machine's operation. The earliest use of paper to store instructions for a machine was the work of
Basile Bouchon who, in 1725, used punched paper rolls to control textile looms. This technology was later developed into the wildly successful
Jacquard loom. The 19th century saw several other uses of paper for controlling machines. In 1846, telegrams could be prerecorded on
punched tape and rapidly transmitted using
Alexander Bain's automatic telegraph. Several inventors took the concept of a mechanical organ and used paper to represent the music. Binary punched card In the late 1880s
Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. Prior uses of machine readable media, above, had been for control (
automatons,
piano rolls,
looms, ...), not data. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on
punched cards..." Hollerith's method was used in the 1890 census. Hollerith's company eventually became the core of
IBM. Other technologies were also developed that allowed machines to work with marks on paper instead of punched holes. This technology was widely used for
tabulating votes and grading
standardized tests. Banks used magnetic ink on checks, supporting MICR scanning. In an early electronic computing device, the
Atanasoff–Berry Computer, electric sparks were used to singe small holes in paper cards to represent binary data. The altered
dielectric constant of the paper at the location of the holes could then be used to read the binary data back into the machine by means of electric sparks of lower voltage than the sparks used to create the holes. This form of paper data storage was never made reliable and was not used in any subsequent machine. ==Modern techniques==