Heide 2009 - Revision history

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			== 4 ==

			To solve the problem of increased errors from brush reading, Hollerith invented a speck detector in 1914 that located ﬂaws in card stock using an electric test current.

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			In 1908, the ﬁrst printing tabulator in the Census Bureau had demonstrated the feasibility of such a design. This printing tabulator required manual release by the operator for each print and only printed totals.

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			By 1911, the listing and total printing Burroughs adding machine had been a great success for two decades. Furthermore, a listing and total printing tabulator was a major feature of John Royden Peirce’s punched-card system, marketed in 1912.

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			The development of a printing tabulator was the ﬁrst instance in which the Tabulating Machine Company pursued several competing develop- ment paths, but the scope of what inventors were developing remained limited to the capability to print numbers and the implementation of automatic group control. Watson assigned both Clair Lake and Fred Car- roll the task of independently developing printing tabulators.39

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			Key ofﬁce machines could subtract, multiply, and print letters. Address plate technology was a well-established, though cumbersome means to address letters and other correspondence.

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			Before joining the Tabulating Machine Com- pany, Peirce had built a “notice writing” machine for the insurance divi- sion of the United States Veterans Bureau (Bureau of War Risk Insurance until 1924). This machine issued and addressed notices to be sent to poli- cyholders, with a punched stub to be detached when paid to facilitate subsequent bookkeeping. After Peirce had joined the Tabulating Machine Company, a similar machine was built and supplied to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York. 63During the 1920s Peirce con- tinued this line of development at IBM, and it was only terminated in 1930 after an additional tabulator had been supplied to Metropolitan. This tabulator could print numbers and letters in separate printing posi- tions and it used Peirce’s double-deck 86-column card.

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			Lake’s design was based on the representation of each character by up to two perforations, which was much simpler than Peirce’s repre- sentation. The ability to store alphabetic information in addition to num- bers was judged, as yet, to be not sufﬁciently important to the customers.

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			66The age of the standard 45-column card was over and was about to be succeeded by proprietary cards.

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			68The dismissal of the Lake group’s work on an alphanumeric tabulator in 1928 and the termination of Peirce’s alphanumeric system in 1930 disclosed the IBM management’s low assess- ment of the importance of this feature for its customers.

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			A new drive for alphabetic tabulator capability started in 1930. While Peirce had built punched-card machines with letters for insurance compa- nies between 1916 and 1930, IBM now focused on chain stores that were undergoing a roaring expansion.

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			This development was based on the invention in 1927 at the Danat Bank in Germany of a simple reduced alphabet printing unit, which substituted the ten numbers on a numeric type bar with ten selected letters. This Ger- man invention had been acquired by IBM in New York by 1930. 72First, IBM implemented a reduced alphabet by substituting the ten digits on several type bars in a tabulator with ten selected alphabet characters.

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			The ﬁrst of a series of full alphabet tabulators followed two years later, in 1933. A perforation in one of the top three rows combined with a per- foration in one of the bottom nine rows were used to designate letters, which supplemented the old standard for representing digits on punched cards. This alphanumeric code provided for ten numeric and twenty-six nonnumeric characters, and it survived to the end of the punched-card era. 76This was sufﬁcient for the English alphabet, but the German alphabet, for example, has several additional characters, which caused problems. Later types of tabulators enabled twenty-eight alphabetic characters in addition to two special characters, for example, & and * and were sufﬁcient for most national alphab…

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			Addressing letters later became an important punched-card task, but IBM did not perceive sufﬁcient demand for this application in the United States in the 1930s to prioritize production of this feature. The ﬁrst alphanumeric tabulators could only print one line per card. This was not adequate, as three lines were needed for an address and one card of eighty columns could hold all the information needed for an address. In 1937, IBM began production of a tabulator for the French market, which could print two lines from a single card, possibly to attain a contract on a conscription and mobilization register. However, a tabulator that printed three lines from a single card only appeared on the American market in 1941.

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			== 5 ==

			While in Europe in the spring of 1889, Hollerith exhibited his tabulator in Paris at the Great Exhibition commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution.

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			== 6 ==

			March’s classi-compteur had a full keyboard of sixty keys, each con- nected to a counter that consisted of four ten-digit printing wheels placed in the rows on the lid behind the keyboard, enabling the counting of up to 9,999 entries in each of its sixty positions. 69When the classi-compteur was used to compile a table, each of its keys corresponded to one entry in the table. Processing was accomplished by the operator keying in the rel- evant information from a form. During this process the key or keys pressed stayed locked in a lower position, and the operator could correct an error by ﬁrst unlocking the key or keys and then entering the information cor- rectly. When all the information from the form was entered, the operator pulled a handle that made the counters connected to the pressed keys advance one unit, and the operator proceeded to the next form.

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			When the operator had completed entering the information for a table, she placed a sheet of carbon paper above the counters and tilted the mov- able frame that held a series of rollers between which paper ran from a large roll. This left an impression of the printing wheels on the white paper. The rollers moved the paper along to a new zone of blank paper,…

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			The lack of demand in the 1890s was caused by the exclusive focus on processing census statistics. This was an area in which Europe had efﬁcient organizational structures—in contrast to the United States.

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			The ability to print processed numbers and results was considered essential by several punched-card users in Germany and Great Britain and became a crucial competitive advantage for the Powers company in Great Britain.

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			== 7 ==

			Prudential used typewriters to produce the lists of policies for the frequent collection of industrial insurance premiums. In 1914, Frank P. Symmons of Prudential suggested to the British Powers agency that they could ease production these lists by using punched cards. This would require letter representation and a tabulator that could print the names of policyholders in addition to policy numbers and amounts to be collected. Charles Foster, an engineer working at the Powers agency, accepted the challenge and designed an alphabet printing unit for the standard numerical American produced tabulators. The alphabet printing unit was completed in 1916 and could print a reduced alphabet of twenty- three letters but not digits. The remaining three letters of the English alphabet were provided through double use of three letters. 5This alphabet printing unit could print the names of policyholders for internal use in the company, but it was not able to print full addresses, as these required a combination of letters and digits. This limited the alphabet printing unit’s usefulness in policy administration, but the unit was used to print speciﬁ- cations in bookkeeping projects else…

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			Punched-card production at the Powers-Samas Company in London, 1937. Production of the cards themselves contributed up to a third of the punched- card producers’ revenues.

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			The state’s majority share of the punched-card business in the 1930s distinguished France from Germany and Great Britain, with the French state gaining a signiﬁcant role in shaping punched-card systems.

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			Through the development of these different punched-card systems, European punched-card producers contributed signiﬁcantly to shaping punched-card technology. The most noticeable examples were the British Powers company making the ﬁrst letter printing tabulator, Dehomag pro- ducing punched-card machines with advanced calculation facilities, and the Bull company making alphanumeric tabulators that used printing wheels.

			== 8 ==

			== Conclusion ==

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Created page with "Heide, Lars. ''Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945.'' Baltimore: JHU Press, 2009. == 3 == The traditional American ofﬁce before the Civil..."

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Heide, Lars. ''Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945.'' Baltimore: JHU Press, 2009.

== 3 ==

The traditional American ofﬁce before the Civil War was staffed by male clerks, who wrote everything by hand in pen and ink. Their work was done in bound volumes, like account ledgers, copy books of outgoing letters, and minutes of the board of directors’ meetings, when the com- pany became incorporated and a board was appointed. Bound volumes had the advantage of keeping things together, and they prevented fraud. Incoming letters were loose leaf, which was considered a problem. Some companies bound incoming letters, others kept brief records in bound letter journals, while a third answer was just to keep the loose-leaf letters stitched on strings or as a stack in a drawer or a box. Vertical ﬁling systems were marketed for this purpose around 1900, and accu-

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rate ﬁling was ensured by trusted clerks and through records in bound volumes.

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…a large proportion of the workers in the new-style ofﬁces were assigned narrow duties involving routine work, like typing, punching, or shorthand, based on training in these ﬁelds. Female ofﬁce workers were often employed in this kind of routine job, and most of them remained in such positions. Routinization, formal hierarchies, and ofﬁce machines became crucial components in the organization of big ofﬁces.

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Remington of Ilion, New York, started to produce typewriters in 1874. Their success encouraged competitors to enter the market, so that by 1890 thirty typewriter producers existed in the United States, growing to eighty-ﬁve producers by 1910.

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…the ﬁrst reliable keyboard adding machines started to be produced in the United States by Dorr E. Felt and William S. Burroughs in the 1880s. In 1887, Felt began to market his nonprinting adding machine, in which the total was displayed on a visible result register…

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…in 1887, he added what became his adding machines’ outstanding accomplishment: printing the numbers as they were entered and the totals. 6A printout enabled the operator to check an addi- tion much more easily; previously operators had had to repeat their cal- culation until they got the same result twice.

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By 1900, separate typewriter and adding machine industries had emerged, each based on a machine stabilized in one or a few versions, and each market segment was highly competitive.

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Three years later, Burroughs launched a machine that could print identiﬁcation numbers and dates in addition to the ﬁgures posted, enabling a bank, for example, to print the account number for each entry. Both machines had a wide carriage that allowed the use of wide sheets or forms. This eased the use of adding machine prints as pages in loose-leaf l…

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The integration of typewriters and adding machines emerged in several variants. One type consisted of invoicing machines based on combinations of typewriters and adding machines, for example the Ellis adding-type- writer and the Moon-Hopkins billing machine. They were complex designs and slow to use, as the operator had to type the full name and address for every invoice. The design of the Ellis adding-typewriter was ﬁnalized in 1906 and subsequently produced. Production of the Moon-Hopkins bill- ing machine started in 1908. 12An alternative was to use a set of separate machines to calculate, issue, and address invoices. For example, addressing could be performed by use of an addressograph, but then the alphabetic capability was only used for writing invoice speciﬁcations. Further, it was necessary to perform multiplications either by hand or by use of a separate multiplication machine.

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In the decade after 1905, three challengers to Hollerith emerged: the Census Bureau machine shop, John Royden Peirce’s punched-card systems, and the Powers Accounting Machine Company.

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Compared with the key-set bookkeeping machines built during the next couple of decades, the core advantage of the punched card was the need for only one data entry for several jobs. The cost of attaining this was higher standardization requirements and more rigorous organization.

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For the ﬁrst time, a tabulator could print the result on paper.

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A programmable and printing tabulator proved hard to build. The ability to print and program was essential to attract bookkeeping jobs, as several tabulator settings were needed in a bookkeeping installation. Pow- ers’ ﬁrst tabulator was a prototype that was based on the technology of the printing Felt and Tarrant adding machines, which greatly eased his work, but he never was able to make these machines reliable.

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The Powers tabulator’s ability to print was a requisite for most book- keeping tasks. Also, printing became a useful capability of actuarial sta- tistics, which was the reason the Actuarial Society of the United States chose Powers equipment for their big mortality investigation, which was processed from 1916 to 1918.52

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Punched cards did not always have the best quality. They could hold electric conductive particles, metal, or carbon grains, which became false holes in electric reading. Small cracks or fallen out bits could cause false reading for both kinds of machines, but the conductive particles only caused problems on electromechanical machines.

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The major advantage of punched-card-based printing was the auto- matic execution, but in advance of being printed, all cards had to be packed in a deck of cards. Further, the paper applied was advanced by rubber rollers, which had limited precision.

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Soon, he engaged his own team of engineers, ﬁrst and foremost William Walter Lasker, who brought expertise in typewriter design.

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This was the ﬁrst successful printing tabulator that both listed information from punched cards on a sheet or paper roll and printed totals. The operation of the machine, either listing all cards or printing the totals, was selected by shifting a switch.

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Numeric printing had been the Powers company’s original competitive advantage, but only in 1919 did it attain a full set of reliable punch, sorter, and tabulator machines to make the best of this advantage—which they then lost two years later when the Tabulating Machine Company intro- duced their numeric printing tabulator.

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First, the Powers Accounting Machine Company worked to develop bookkeeping applica- tions requiring letter printing in 1924.

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Punched-card-based letter printing was ﬁrst marketed by the British Powers company in 1921. However, this feature could only manage a reduced alphabet, and letter printing was restricted to separate printing positions, which could not print numbers. The British Powers company developed this feature at the instigation of the Prudential Insurance Com- pany in London that wanted names as well as amounts to be represented in the perforated cards.

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As early as 1916, the British Powers company ﬁled a patent applica- tion on letter printing, but at the same time the American company refused to adopt this facility. The American company ﬁrst embraced alphabetic printing in 1924. Lasker implemented the British design by developing a new tabulator that could print letters and numbers in sepa- rate printing positions like the British model.

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The ﬁrst American alphabetic printing tabulator was installed in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York in 1925.

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In 1925, the Powers company’s system with a reduced alphabet was the only other punched-card system with letters available in the United States. However its success was very limited, and Remington Rand chose not to implement it on the 90-column punched card, when it introduced this card as its standard between 1929 and 1935. This history indicated that the Powers company and Remington Rand perceived a very weak demand for letter printing until the mid-1930s.

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It was planned to use punched cards in issuing customer statements, as opposed to address plates that were usually used for this purpose in the Remington Rand applications at that time. The addresses were to be pro- duced by use of the reduced Remington Rand alphabet with twenty-three letters and three cards for every address, each corresponding to one of the lines: name, street number and name, and city and state. This application was to be based on the old 45-column card, as the new 90-column card could not yet hold letters. This project was never implemented, and Rem- ington Rand did not pursue a comparable integrated system until the end

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of the Second World War. Mistakes due to technical imperfections were highly probable, but Remington Rand’s subsequent nonpursuance of this promising application indicates a lack of demand rather than technical difﬁculties.

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Though the new Remington Rand card had capacity to become alphanumeric, the ﬁrst new machines only served the double-deck card with numeric representation.The American Powers system of reduced alphabet representation from 1924 had not been a sufﬁcient success to be included into Remington Rand’s new line of machines. However, it was possible to use a part of a punched card for letters to be printed, by using the old standard 45-column positions, and the rest of the card for the numeric double-deck standard.

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The difﬁculties of visual reading of the numeric double-deck standard, distinguished it from the old numeric 45-column standard. To alleviate this problem, Remington Rand produced an “interpreter” that printed the meaning of the punched holes on the card.

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For all the applications considered by Peirce, the card was the original form that recorded the transaction. This shows that Peirce saw punched cards in a different role than his competitors did. He was the ﬁrst to realize that a punched card could contain the original entry.

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Already during the negotia- tions in 1913, Peirce had proposed a system based on a “master card” on every policy that held punched information of the policyholder’s name and address along with the relevant numerical information indicating

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amount insured, amount to be paid, date of payment, and other relevant information. The punched information was also to be printed on the card, which would be used to generate invoices, receipts, and other transaction documents.

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The master card revived Peirce’s original vision of punched-card systems with letters, but no one had any experience using letter codes in punched cards in 1913. A suitable code was needed, together with a punched card holding sufﬁcient information.

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Further, Peirce proposed preparing various internal records, including a register of policies issued and an agent’s list of notices. The planned alphanumeric punch was a modernized version of his punch design from 1907 and resembled a typewriter.

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By 1922, this system included a prototype tabulator that implemented the ﬁrst alphanumeric representation in punched cards, needed for address- ing letters to policyholders.

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In contrast to the two other challengers, John Royden Peirce was a visionary and from the outset worked for punched-card-based bookkeep- ing and alphanumeric systems to gain access to business of much greater volume. By doing this, he opened a renegotiation of the very nature and purpose of punched cards and which abilities punched-card technology should have. However, Peirce ran into problems caused by his inability to implement his ideas and designs and to produce reliable machines…

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