Fredrik Rosing Bull began his studies in civil engineering at the reputable Technical School of Kristiania (now Oslo ingeniørhøgskole) in 1904 and graduated in 1907.

[citation needed] In 1916 he was hired as a technical inspector at the insurance company Storebrand where he came into contact with the tabulating machines of those days.

As a result, Bull convinced his employer, Storebrand, to pay him an advance of $10,000[clarification needed] to develop a new machine.

The use of 45 column punched cards enabled the machine to read the information while making contact through the holes.

[1] Around that time Bull contacted a friend from high school in Nordstrand Reidar Knutsen, who headed the company A/S Oka.

After its initial success Bull undertook the production of new copies of his T-30 machine, adding improvements as he went.

Fredrik then signed a contract with the Oka company led by [Reidar Knutsen, which assumed the costs of manufacturing and marketing.

[1] The Bull machine used punched card of 45 columns, with round holes and a rotating adder.

His machine was substantially better than its competition, Hollerith and Powers, through the mechanism of punched card pre-selection.

[citation needed] The machine proved a success and received very good reviews and publicity[citation needed] The key factors for success were the technical quality of the machine, the ease of use, the new pre-selection technology, the cost savings and the opportunity for users to avoid IBM's monopoly and purchase their own equipment instead of renting it.

[citation needed] Some of the notable improvements were: the change of switches that controlled the entry of punched cards and the expansion device in larger scale.

One major problem Bull and Knutsen had was that because of the nature of the contacts, sparks were created causing the machine to crash frequently.

Knut Andreas Knutsen was constantly traveling to these countries for repair and modifications at client sites.

Despite the diagnosis in the summer of 1924, Bull continued to work until his condition worsened in the fall of that year.

Knutsen focused on new designs to record tabulation results on paper forms, sorted numerically and alphabetically.

In 1927, the Belgian Émile Genon [fr], bought the patents to operate in the European continent (excluding Scandinavia).