The 1890 census was the first to be compiled using methods invented by Herman Hollerith and was overseen by Superintendents Robert P. Porter (1889–1893) and  Carroll D. Wright (1893–1897).
Data was entered on a machine readable medium, punched cards, and tabulated by machine.
The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the number of data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the volume of scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.
The total population of 62,947,714, the family, or rough, count, was announced after only six weeks of processing (punched cards were not used for this tabulation).
The public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was widely believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000.
The 1890 census was the first to be compiled using methods invented by Herman Hollerith and was overseen by Superintendents Robert P. Porter (1889–1893) and  Carroll D. Wright (1893–1897). Data was entered on a machine readable medium, punched cards, and tabulated by machine. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the number of data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the volume of scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census. The total population of 62,947,714, the family, or rough, count, was announced after only six weeks of processing (punched cards were not used for this tabulation). The public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was widely believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000.
1890 United States Census