The tabulating machine was an

electromechanical In engineering, electromechanics combines processes and procedures drawn from electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Electromechanics focuses on the interaction of electrical and mechanical systems as a whole and how the two systems ...

machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on

punched card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

s. Invented by

Herman Hollerith Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, i ...

, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models were widely used for business applications such as accounting and

inventory control Inventory control or stock control can be broadly defined as "the activity of checking a shop's stock". It is the process of ensuring that the right amount of supply is available within a business. However, a more focused definition takes into acco ...

. It spawned a class of machines, known as

unit record equipment Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, well before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using electromechanical machines collectively referred to as unit record equipment, electric accounting machines (EAM) or ...

, and the data processing industry. The term "

Super Computing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions p ...

" was used by the ''

New York World The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers. It was a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under pub ...

'' newspaper in 1931 to refer to a large custom-built tabulator that IBM made for

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

1890 census

The 1880 census had taken eight years to process. Since the

U.S. Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the nation ...

mandates a census every ten years to apportion both congressional representatives and

direct tax Although the actual definitions vary between jurisdictions, in general, a direct tax or income tax is a tax imposed upon a person or property as distinct from a tax imposed upon a transaction, which is described as an indirect tax. There is a di ...

es among the states, a combination of larger staff and faster-recording systems was required. In the late 1880s

, inspired by conductors using holes punched in different positions on a railway ticket to record traveler details such as gender and approximate age, invented the recording of data on a machine-readable medium. Prior uses of machine-readable media had been for lists of instructions (not data) to drive programmed machines such as Jacquard looms. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on

s..." Hollerith used punched cards with round holes, 12 rows, and 24 columns. The cards measured 3-1/4 inches by 6-5/8 inches. His tabulator used electromechanical solenoids to increment mechanical counters. A set of spring-loaded wires were suspended over the card reader. The card sat over pools of mercury, pools corresponding to the possible hole positions in the card. When the wires were pressed onto the card, punched holes allowed wires to dip into the mercury pools, making an electrical contact that could be used for counting, sorting, and setting off a bell to let the operator know the card had been read. The tabulator had 40 counters, each with a dial divided into 100 divisions, with two indicator hands; one which stepped one unit with each counting pulse, the other which advanced one unit every time the other dial made a complete revolution. This arrangement allowed a count of up to 9,999. During a given tabulating run, counters could be assigned to a specific hole or, by using

relay logic Relay logic is a method of implementing combinational logic in electrical control circuits by using several electrical relays wired in a particular configuration. Ladder logic The schematic diagrams for relay logic circuits are often calle ...

, to a combination of holes, e.g. to count married females. If the card was to be sorted, a compartment lid of the sorting box would open for storage of the card, the choice of compartment depending on the data in the card. Hollerith's method was used for the 1890 census. Clerks used

keypunch A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, ...

es to punch holes in the cards entering age, state of residence, gender, and other information from the returns. Some 100 million cards were generated and "the cards were only passed through the machines four times during the whole of the operations."* According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the census results were "... finished months ahead of schedule and far under budget."

Following the 1890 census

The advantages of the technology were immediately apparent for accounting and tracking inventory. Hollerith started his own business as ''The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System'', specializing in punched card data processing equipment. In 1896 he incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company. In that year he introduced the Hollerith Integrating Tabulator, which could add numbers coded on punched cards, not just count the number of holes. Punched cards were still read manually using the pins and mercury pool reader. 1900 saw the Hollerith Automatic Feed Tabulator used in that year's U.S. census. A control panel was incorporated in the 1906 Type 1. In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated (via stock acquisition) to form a fifth company, the

Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) was a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems subsequently known as IBM. In 1911, financier and noted trust organizer, "Father of Trusts", Charles R. Flint ama ...

(CTR). The

Powers Accounting Machine Company The Powers Accounting Machine was an information processing device developed in the early 20th century for the U.S. Census Bureau. It was then produced and marketed by the Powers Accounting Machine Company, an information technology company founded ...

was formed that same year and, like Hollerith, with machines first developed at the Census Bureau. In 1919 the first

Bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e., cows), bulls have long been an important symbol in many religions, includin ...

tabulator prototype was developed. Tabulators that could print, and with removable control panels, appeared in the 1920s. In 1924 CTR was renamed International Business Machines (IBM). In 1927 Remington Rand acquired the Powers Accounting Machine Company. In 1933 The Tabulating Machine Company was subsumed into IBM. These companies continued to develop faster and more sophisticated tabulators, culminating in tabulators such as 1949

IBM 407 The IBM 407 Accounting Machine, introduced in 1949, was one of a long line of IBM tabulating machines dating back to the days of Herman Hollerith. It had a card reader and printer; a summary punch could be attached. Processing was directed by ...

and 1952 Remington Rand 409. Tabulating machines continued to be used well after the introduction of commercial electronic computers in the 1950s. Many applications using unit record tabulators were migrated to computers such as the

IBM 1401 The IBM 1401 is a variable-wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing unit record equipment for processing data stored on pu ...

. Two programming languages, FARGO and RPG, were created to aid this migration. Since tabulator control panels were based on the machine cycle, both FARGO and RPG emulated the notion of the machine cycle and training material showed the control panel vs. programming language coding sheet relationships.

Operation

In its basic form, a tabulating machine would read one card at a time, print portions (fields) of the card on fan-fold paper, possibly rearranged, and add one or more numbers punched on the card to one or more counters, called accumulators. On early models, the accumulator register dials would be read manually after a card run to get totals. Later models could print totals directly. Cards with a particular punch could be treated as master cards causing different behavior. For example, customer master cards could be merged with sorted cards recording individual items purchased. When read by the tabulating machine to create invoices, the billing address and customer number would be printed from the master card, and then individual items purchased and their price would be printed. When the next master card was detected, the total price would be printed from the accumulator and the page ejected to the top of the next page, typically using a

carriage control tape A carriage control tape was a loop of punched tape that was used to synchronize rapid vertical page movement in most IBM and many other line printer A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early ...

. With successive stages or cycles of punched-card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made if one had a sufficient set of equipment. (In modern data processing terms, one can think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY for totals and counts, then a SORT BY; and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed.) A human operator had to retrieve, load, and store the various card decks at each stage.

Selected models and timeline

Hollerith's first tabulators were used for the U.S. 1890 Census. The first Tabulating Machine Company (TMC) automatic feed tabulator, operating at 150 cards/minute, was developed in 1906. The first TMC printing tabulator was developed in 1920. TMC Type IV Accounting Machine (later renamed the IBM 301), from th
IBM Archives

The 301 (better known as the ''Type IV'') Accounting Machine was the first card-controlled machine to incorporate class selection, automatic subtraction, and printing of a net positive or negative balance. Dating to 1928, this machine exemplifies the transition from tabulating to accounting machines. The Type IV could list 100 cards per minute.

1931 IBM 401:

The 401, introduced in 1933, was an early entry in a long series of IBM alphabetic tabulators and accounting machines. It was developed by a team headed by J. R. Peirce and incorporated significant functions and features invented by A. W. Mills, F. J. Furman and E. J. Rabenda. The 401 added at a speed of 150 cards per minute and listed alphanumerical data at 80 cards per minute.

IBM 405:

Introduced in 1934, the 405 Alphabetical Accounting Machine was the basic bookkeeping and accounting machine marketed by IBM for many years. Important features were expanded adding capacity, greater flexibility of counter grouping, direct printing of the entire alphabet, direct subtraction and printing of either debit or credit balance from any counter. Commonly called the 405 "tabulator," this machine remained the flagship of IBM's product line until after World War II. The British at
Hut 8 Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station, located in Buckinghamshire) tasked with solving German naval ( Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was ...
used Hollerith machinery to gain some knowledge of
Known-plaintext attack The known-plaintext attack (KPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has access to both the plaintext (called a crib), and its encrypted version (ciphertext). These can be used to reveal further secret information such as secr ...
cribs used by encrypted German messages.

IBM 402 The IBM 402 and IBM 403 Accounting Machines were tabulating machines introduced by International Business Machines in the late 1940s. Overview The 402 could read punched cards at a speed of 80 to 150 cards per minute, depending on process op ...

and 403, from 1948, were modernized successors to the 405. IBM402plugboard

The 1952 Bull Gamma 3 could be attached to this tabulator or to a card read/punch.

Introduced in 1949, the 407 was the mainstay of the IBM unit record product line for almost three decades. It was later adapted to serve as an input/output peripheral for several early electronic calculators and computers. Its printing mechanism was used in the
IBM 716 The IBM 716 line printer was used with IBM 700/7000 series computers in the 1950s and 1960s. It was introduced on May 21, 1952 with the IBM 701 and withdrawn from marketing on July 14, 1969. Overview The 716 was based on IBM 407 accounting machin ...
line printer for the
IBM 700/7000 series The IBM 700/7000 series is a series of large-scale (mainframe) computer systems that were made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series includes several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s use vacuum-tube lo ...
and later with the
IBM 1130 The IBM 1130 Computing System, introduced in 1965, was IBM's least expensive computer at that time. A binary 16-bit machine, it was marketed to price-sensitive, computing-intensive technical markets, like education and engineering, succeeding th ...
through the mid-1970s.

The IBM 407 Accounting Machine was withdrawn from marketing in 1976, signaling the end of the unit record era.

IBM 421 The IBM 421 accounting machine saw use in the 1960s. The largely-mechanical IBM 421 read 80-column punch cards and could print upper-case letters of the alphabet, the decimal digits 0 to 9, a period (.), and plus and minus signs. The operatio ...

Notes

References

External links

Columbia University Computing History: Hollerith & IBM Tabulators and Accounting Machines

IBM Accounting Machine manuals
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tabulating Machine Computer-related introductions in 1890 American inventions Mechanical calculators Unit record equipment IBM unit record equipment Punched card