Herman Hollerith, whose 1889 patent covered the punched-card electric tabulating system used to process the 1890 census, founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to commercialize it. Through a series of mergers that firm became, in 1924, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. The punched-card tabulator was the commercial and technical ancestor of the office computing industry that IBM would later dominate.