Tabulating machine

It spawned a class of machines, known as unit record equipment, and the data processing industry.

The term "Super Computing" was used by the New York World newspaper in 1931 to refer to a large custom-built tabulator that IBM made for Columbia University.

[2] Since the U.S. Constitution mandates a census every ten years to apportion both congressional representatives and direct taxes among the states, a combination of larger staff and faster-recording systems was required.

In the late 1880s Herman Hollerith, 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.

Clerks used keypunches to punch holes in the cards entering age, state of residence, gender, and other information from the returns.

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.

On early models, the accumulator register dials would be read manually after a card run to get totals.

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.)

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.

Important features were expanded adding capacity, greater flexibility of counter grouping,[b] direct printing of the entire alphabet, direct subtraction[c] 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.

[17][18] The British at Hut 8 used Hollerith machinery to gain some knowledge of Known-plaintext attack cribs used by encrypted German messages.