 |
Powers-Samas Accounting Machine
Powers-Samas was a British company which sold unit record equipment. In 1915, Powers Tabulating Machine Company established European operations through the Accounting and Tabulating Machine Company of Great Britain Limited. In 1929, it was renamed to Powers-Samas Accounting Machines Limited (Samas, full name Societe Anonyme des Machines a Statistiques, had been the Powers' sales agency in France, formed in 1922). The informal reference "Acc and Tab" would persist. During the Second World War it produced large numbers of Typex cipher machines, derived from the German Enigma, for use by the British Armed Forces and other government departments. In 1959, it merged with the competing British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) to form International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). Description Powers-Samas machines detected the holes in punched cards mechanically, unlike IBM equipment where holes in punched cards are detected by electrical circuits. Pins that could drop through roun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
 |
Powers-Samas Accounting Machine
Powers-Samas was a British company which sold unit record equipment. In 1915, Powers Tabulating Machine Company established European operations through the Accounting and Tabulating Machine Company of Great Britain Limited. In 1929, it was renamed to Powers-Samas Accounting Machines Limited (Samas, full name Societe Anonyme des Machines a Statistiques, had been the Powers' sales agency in France, formed in 1922). The informal reference "Acc and Tab" would persist. During the Second World War it produced large numbers of Typex cipher machines, derived from the German Enigma, for use by the British Armed Forces and other government departments. In 1959, it merged with the competing British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) to form International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). Description Powers-Samas machines detected the holes in punched cards mechanically, unlike IBM equipment where holes in punched cards are detected by electrical circuits. Pins that could drop through roun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
 |
Unit Record Equipment
Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, well before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using Electromechanics, electromechanical machines collectively referred to as unit record equipment, electric accounting machines (EAM) or tabulating machines. Unit record machines came to be as ubiquitous in industry and government in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century as computers became in the last third. They allowed large volume, sophisticated data-processing tasks to be accomplished before electronic computers were invented and while they were still in their infancy. This data processing was accomplished by processing punched cards through various unit record machines in a carefully choreographed progression. This progression, or flow, from machine to machine was often planned and documented with detailed flowcharts that used standardized symbols for documents and the various machine functions. All but the earliest machines had high-speed me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
Powers Accounting Machine
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 by the machine's developer. The company thrived in the early 20th century as a producer of tabulating machines. It was a predecessor to the Unisys corporation. Development Census Bureau In 1890, the government began leasing tabulating machines from Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, to more efficiently, expansively, and accurately produce the national census. In 1900, Hollerith raised the lease pricing. This led the newly formed U.S. Census Bureau to seek other suppliers under its new director, Simon North, in 1903. North returned most of Hollerith's machines, and the Census Bureau began using Charles F. Pidgin's tabulators. These machines proved too slow, so the Bureau undertook to develop its own machine for the 1910 ce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
 |
Enigma Machine
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the Wehrmacht, German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages. The Enigma has an electromechanical Rotor machine, rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma's keyboard and another person writes down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard illuminated at each key press. If plaintext is entered, the illuminated letters are the ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. The security of the system depends on machine settings that were generally changed daily, based ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
British Tabulating Machine Company
__NOTOC__ The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) was a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed some 200 "bombes", machines used at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine ciphers. History The company was formed in 1902 as The Tabulator Limited, after Robert Porter obtained the rights to sell Herman Hollerith's patented machines from the US Tabulating Machine Company (later to become IBM). During 1907, the company was renamed the "British Tabulating Machine Company Limited". In 1920, the company moved from London to Letchworth, Hertfordshire; it was also at this point that it started manufacturing its own machines, rather than simply reselling Hollerith equipment. Annual revenues were £6K in 1915, £122K in 1925, and £170K in 1937. In 1916 there were 45 staff; this increased to 132 in 1922, 326 in 1929 and 1,225 in 1939. In return for the exclusive right to mark ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
|
International Computers And Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It exported computers to many countries and in 1968 became part of International Computers Limited (ICL). Products The ICT 1101 was known as the EMIDEC 1100 computer before the acquisition of the EMI Computing Services Division who designed and produced it. The Hollerith Electronic Computer, ICT 1201 computer used vacuum tube, thermionic valve technology and its main memory was Drum memory, drum storage. Input was from 80-column punched cards and output was to 80-column cards and a Line printer, printer. Before the merger, under BTM, this had been known as the HEC4 (Herman Hollerith, Hollerith Electronic Computer, fourth version). The drum memory held 1K of 40-bit words. The computer was programmed using binary machine code instructions. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
 |
Punched Cards
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widely used for data processing, the control of automated machines, and computing. Early applications included controlling weaving looms and recording census data. Punched cards were widely used in the 20th century, where unit record machines, organized into data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, data output, and data storage. The IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Punched cards were used for decades before being replaced by magnetic storage and terminals. Their influence persists in cultural references, standardized data layouts, and computing conventions such as 80-c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
 |
Plugboard
A plugboard or control panel (the term used depends on the application area) is an array of jack (connector), jacks or sockets (often called hubs) into which patch cords can be inserted to complete an electrical circuit. Control panels are sometimes used to direct the operation of unit record equipment, :Cryptographic hardware, cipher machines, and History of computing hardware#Digital computation, early computers. The array of holes is often contained in a flat removable panel that can be inserted into a machine and pressed against an array of contacts. This allows the machine to be quickly switched between different applications. The contacts on the machine are hard wired to the various devices that comprise the machine, such as relays, counters, inputs from each card reader column, outputs to a card punch column or printer position, and so on. The wiring on a plugboard connects these devices to perform a specific function, say reading cards and summing up the numbers punched ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
Program (machine)
A program is a set of instructions used to control the behavior of a machine. Examples of such programs include: *The sequence of cards used by a Jacquard loom to produce a given pattern within weaved cloth. Invented in 1801, it used holes in punched cards to represent sewing loom arm movements in order to generate decorative patterns automatically. *A computer program (software) is a list of instructions to be executed by a computer. *Barrels, punched cards and music rolls encoding music to be played by player pianos, fairground organs, barrel organ A barrel organ (also called roller organ or crank organ) is a France, French mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of organ pipe, pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The basic ...s and music boxes. *The automatic flute player, which was invented in the 9th century by the Banū Mūsā brothers in Baghdad, is the first known example of a programmable machin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
|
|
Defunct Manufacturing Companies Of The United Kingdom
{{Disambiguation ...
Defunct may refer to: * ''Defunct'' (video game), 2014 * Zombie process or defunct process, in Unix-like operating systems See also * * :Former entities * End-of-life product * Obsolescence Obsolescence is the process of becoming antiquated, out of date, old-fashioned, no longer in general use, or no longer useful, or the condition of being in such a state. When used in a biological sense, it means imperfect or rudimentary when comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |