A deck of punched cards containing the table (calculated and punched by other unit record equipment) to be printed was put into the IBM 016, which read them and then controlled the typing of the typewriter through a box containing solenoids that depressed the keys.
[1][2] Columbia University Astronomy Professor Wallace Eckert was examining the process used by the Navy to produce Air Almanacs.
Deciding that the manual computation techniques used were too slow and error prone, he recommended automating the process with existing punched card based unit record equipment.
Initially IBM 405 accounting machines with special modifications were used, but he wanted something better.
In 1941 Eckert developed a specification for a card-driven composing typewriter and asked IBM to design and build it.