Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The term unit record equipment also refers to peripheral equipment attached to computers that reads or writes unit records, e.g., card readers, card punches, printers, MICR readers. IBM was the largest supplier of unit record equipment and this article largely reflects IBM practice and terminology.
Many applications using unit record tabulators were migrated to computers such as the IBM 1401. Two programming languages, FARGO and RPG, were created to aid this migration. 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 ...
The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) was a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed some 200 "bombes", machines used at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine ciphers.
Unit record equipment was widely used before the introduction of computers. The usefulness of tabulating machines was demonstrated by compiling the 1890 U.S. census, allowing the census to be processed in less than a year and with great labor savings compared to the estimated 13 years by the previous manual method.
The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, reduced the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census. [17]
In 1907, Powers was hired by the US Census Bureau as a mechanical expert to modify unit record equipment invented two decades earlier by Herman Hollerith. Hollerith's equipment was successfully used for the 1890 and 1900 US Censuses, but when Hollerith refused to lower the rental fees for the Census Bureau, the Bureau's director S.N.D. North ...
Powers-Samas machines detected the holes in punched cards mechanically, unlike IBM equipment where holes in punched cards are detected by electrical circuits. Pins that could drop through round holes in punched cards were connected to linkages and their displacement when a hole was present actuated other parts of the machine to produce the desired results.
Unit record" data processing equipment uses punchcards to carry information on a one-item-per-card basis. [15] [16] Unit record machines came to be as ubiquitous in industry and government in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century as computers became in the last third. They allowed large volume, sophisticated data-processing tasks to be ...