Automatic scorer

It was introduced en masse in bowling alleys in the 1970s and combined with mechanical pinsetters to detect overturned pins.

[2] A detection system was developed from the pinsetter mechanism in the 1960s that could tell which pins had been knocked down, and that information could be transferred to a digital computer.

[4] The goal was realized in the late 1960s when a specialized computer was designed for the purpose of automatic scorekeeping for bowling.

[6][7][8] The scoring machine received approval for official use by the American Bowling Congress in August of that year.

[13] The Automatic Scorer digital computer was mathematically accurate, however the detection system at the pinsetter mechanism sometimes reported the wrong number of pins knocked down.

[3] Brunswick had put ten years of research and development into the Automatic Scorer, and by 1972 there were over 500 of these computers installed in bowling centers around the world.

[26] Bowling center owners could use these style automatic scorers for advertising, management, videos, and live television.

[30] Some scoring systems support variations on traditional bowling, such as different kinds of bingo games where certain pins have to be knocked down at certain times or practice regimes where certain spares have to be accomplished.

[31] By this point, QubicaAMF Worldwide, an outgrowth of AMF, was one of the leading providers of bowling scoring equipment.