The US Census Bureau is finally completing what it started 116 years ago. It just announced that it will automate the collection of data for the 2010 census by replacing census-takers’ notepads and pens with handheld computers – HTC smartphones running Windows Mobile, to be precise.

In an article in the January 1900 edition of National Geographic, a Census Bureau administrator named F.W. Wines summed up the census process:

The census impresses the imagination of the American people as something vast and mysterious simply because of the magnitude of the numbers with which it deals and the extent of the territory which it covers. The elements that go to make up a census are very few and very simple. The whole subject divides itself into two parts, collection of data and handling of data collected.

Ten years earlier, in the 1890 census, the Bureau had automated the second part of the process, the “handling of data collected,” by installing the world’s first electromechanical punch-card computer system. The entire history of modern computing can, in fact, be traced to that event, as the punch card systems eventually morphed into electronic computers – and the company founded by the guy who invented the Bureau’s punch-card system, Herman Hollerith, eventually morphed into IBM.

It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long – more than a century – to automate the first part of the census process, the “collection of data.” I wonder if, decades hence, we’ll look back at this event as another watershed event in the history of computing – the moment when, perhaps, true mobile computing arrived.