Accounting / Business Machines Timeline

According to the theory about the origins of counting and writing developed by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, around 8000 BCE the Palaeolithic notched tallies representing the simplest form of counting — in one-to-one correspondence — were superseded by Neolithic clay tokens in various geometric forms suited for concrete counting invented in Mesopotamia. The significance of these tokens "as an operational device in Mesopotamian bureaucracy," was first grasped by archaeologist Pierre Amiet, teacher of Schand-Besserat in 1972 with respect to tokens found in Nuzi, an ancient Mesopotamian city southwest of Kirkuk in modern Al Ta'amim Governorate of Iraq, located near the Tigris river. (Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing I [1992] ix.) 

Cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia began as a system of pictographs written with styli on clay tablets. The earliest cuneiform tablets. written in proto-cuneiform, were discovered in excavations of periods IV-III of the Eanna (Eana) district of Uruk (Warka) an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.

Between 1928 and 1976 approximately 5000 proto-cuneiform tablets were excavated at Uruk by the German Archaeological Institute.

"But these are not the only witnesses to the archaic script. Proto-cuneiform texts corresponding to the Uruk III [circa 3100 BCE] tablets have been found in the northern Babylonian sites of Jemdet Nasr, Khafajah, and Tell Uquair, testifying to the fact that the new technology spread quickly throughout Babylonia soon after its invention (in ancient Iran proto-cuneiform possibly inspired the proto-Elamite script ca. 3100 BC.) Illicit excavations since the 1990s account for several hundred additional texts, which possibly originate from the ancient Babylonian cities of Umma, Adab, and Kish. These texts have the advantage of being generally in better condition than those from Uruk, which, . . . represented discarded rubbish and thus are frequently fragmentary. To date the proto-cuneiform corpus numbers approximately six thousand tablets and fragments" (Christopher Woods, "The Earliest Mespotamian Writing," Chapter 2 of Woods, Teeter, Emberling (eds) Visible Language. Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond [2010] 35-36).

"The formation of an urban society and the innovations that came with it and which occurred for the first time in Uruk – a regional and supraregional centre – had an enormous impact on the entire Near-Eastern world. Very quickly, impressive temples and palaces sprung up, overshadowing the early grand architectural monuments in Uruk’s centre. A striking feature of these new buildings was their form, the ziggurat or stepped tower, which went on to become a defining element of ancient Near-Eastern temple architecture. The use of writing as an administrative tool also laid the foundations for science and learning in the ancient Near East. Very early on, lexical lists of terms and objects began to emerge – the first of their kind – and these were passed down the generations. Some of these records contain lists of city officials and specialist terms for occupations that provide an insight into a highly stratified society. Other records bear lexical lists of everyday objects, providing an insight into material culture. Particular importance was given very early on to observing the stars as a means to read the future. The ancient Babylonian palace of the ruler Sin-Kashid, built in the 2nd millennium BCE, exemplifies Uruk’s role as part of the ancient Near-Eastern empire. The palace served as both the seat of the ruler and as a commercial and administrative centre. It was here that diplomatic correspondence, legal contracts, surety bonds, and various court documents were set in writing. The site also served as a lively trading centre. Deliveries of raw materials were processed into valuable goods that denoted the owner’s status. The palace was also a place where writers were educated. The writers played a vital role in everyday life, as they compiled the correspondence and contractual agreements on behalf of the largely illiterate population" (http://www.uruk-megacity.de/index.php?page_id=6, accessed 01-13-2013).

"Writing emerged in the context of temple bureaucracy in the cities of the southern Iraqi marshes some time in the late fourth millennium BC. A tiny number of accountants used word signs (usually pictograms) and number signs to account for institutional assets — land, labor, animals — and their secondary products. They wrote on refined clay tablets, about the size of a credit card but around 1 cm thick, incising the signs for the objects they were recording with a pointed stylus and impressing the numbers with a cylindrical one. The front surface of the tablet was marked out into boxes, each one containing a single unit of accounting, logically ordered, with the results of calculations (total wages, predicted harvests, and so on) shown on the back. This writing was barely language-specific — it represented concrete nouns, numbers and little else, with only occasional clues to pronunciation and none at all to word order — and was known only to a handful of expert users. Its functionality was as yet so limited that it was used only to keep accounts, or to practice writing the words, numbers, and calculations needed for accountancy" (Robson, "The Clay Tablet Book in Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia," Elliot & Rose [eds.] A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 67-68.)

"Indeed that the vast majority of the earliest texts [discovered at Uruk and elsewhere in Mesopotamia] are administrative in nature suggests that the invention of writing was a response to practical social pressures—simply put, writing faciliated complex bureaucracy. It is important to stress in this connection that literature plays no role in the origins of writing in Mesopotomia. Religious texts, historical documents and letters are not included among the archaic text corpus either. Rather, these text genres arise relatively late, beginning in the middle of the third millennium, some seven hundred or more years after the first written evidence" (Woods, op. cit, 34). 

"The first securely datable mathematical table in world history comes from the Sumerian city of Shuruppag, c. 2600 BCE. The table is ruled into three columns on each side with ten rows on the front or obverse side. The first columns of the obverse list length measures from c. 3.6km to 360 m in descending units of 360 m, followed by the Sumerian word sa ('equal' and/ or 'opposite') while the final column gives their products in area measure. Only six rows are extant or partially preserved on the reverse. They continue the table in smaller units, from 300 to 60 m in 60 m steps, and then perhaps (in the damaged and missing lower half) from 56 to 6 m in 6 m steps. While the table is organized along two axes, there is just one axis of calculation, namely, the horizontal multiplications. Around a thousand tablets were excavated from Shuruppaq, almost all of them from houses and buildings which burned down in a city-wide fire in about 2600 BCE, but sadly we have no detailed context for this table because its excavation number was lost or never recorded." (Eleanor Robson, "Tables and tabular formatting in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, 2500 BCE-50," Campbell-Kelly et al [eds]. The History of Mathematical Tables from Sumer to Spreadsheets [2003] 27-29).

The most famous original document of Babylonian mathematics is Plimpton 322, a partly broken clay tablet, approximately 13cm wide, 9cm tall, and 2cm thick. New York publisher George A. Plimpton purchased the tablet from archaeological dealer, Edgar J. Banks in 1922 or 1923, and bequeathed it with the rest of his collection to Columbia University in 1936. According to Banks, the tablet came from Senkereh, a site in sourthern Iraq, corresponding to the ancient city of Larsa. 

This tablet has a table of four columns and 15 rows of numbers in cuneiform script, and has been called the only true mathematical table surviving from the period.

"The most renowned of all mathematical cuneiform tablets since it was published in 1945, Plimpton 322 reveals that the Babylonians discovered a method of finding Pythagorean triples, that is, sets of three whole numbers such that the square of one of them is the sum of the squares of the other two. By Pythagoras' Theorem, a triangle whose three sides are proportional to a Pythagorean triple is a right-angled triangle. Right-angled triangles with sides proportional to the simplest Pythagorean triples turn up frequently in Babylonian problem texts; but if this tablet had not come to light, we would have had no reason to suspect that a general method capable of generating an unlimited number of distinct Pythagorean triples was known a millennium and a half before Euclid.  

"Plimpton 322 has excited much debate centering on two questions. First, what was the method by which the numbers in the table were calculated? And secondly, what were the purpose and the intellectual context of the tablet? At present there is no agreement among scholars about whether this was a document connected with scribal education, like the majority of Old Babylonian mathematical tablets, or part of a research project" (http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions/before-pythagoras/items/plimpton-322/, accessed 11-23-2010).

Though the consensus may be that the tablet contains a listing of Pythagorean triples, Eleanor Robson pointed out that historical, cultural and linguistic evidence reveal that the tablet is more likely "a list of regular reciprocal pairs": Robson, "Words and Pictures. New Light on Plimpton 322," American Mathematical Monthly 109 (2001) 105-121.

Because the numbering systems of the Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans are not convenient for extensive calculation, it is believed that they used some sort of mechanical calculating device. The simplest form of calculating device is a kind of table or tablet on which calculation can be written in sand or dust, and then easily erased. This is the "sandboard abacus". One derivation of the Latin word abacus comes from the Greek abakos from the Hebrew word abaq, meaning dust.

In his Histories Herodotus of Halicarnassus, written about this time, stated that the Egyptians "write their characters and reckon with pebbles, bringing their hand from right to left, while the Greeks go from left to right." D.E. Smith, in his History of Mathematics II, p. 160 quotes this statement by Herodotus and writes, "Right to left order was that of the hieratic script and there is probably some relation between this script and the abacus. No wall pictures thus far discovered give any evidence of the use of the abacus, but in any collection of Egyptian antiquities there may be found disks of various sizes which may have been used as counters."

Excluding counting on the fingers, counting boards are the earliest known counting device, and a precursor of the abacus. They were made from stone or wood and the counting was done on the board with beads or pebbles or or sand or dust.  These devices have also been called the "sandboard abacus." The earliest surviving example of a counting board or a gaming board may be a tablet found about 1850 CE on the Greek island of Salamis which dates back to about 300 BCE. It is preserved in the National Archaelogical Museum, Athens. 

"It is a slab of white marble 149 cm long, 75 cm wide, and 4.5 cm thick, on which are 5 groups of markings. In the center of the tablet is a set of 5 parallel lines equally divided by a vertical line, capped with a semi-circle at the intersection of the bottom-most horizontal line and the single vertical line. Below these lines is a wide space with a horizontal crack dividing it. Below this crack is another group of eleven parallel lines, again divided into two sections by a line perpendicular to them, but with the semi-circle at the top of the intersection; the third, sixth and ninth of these lines are marked with a cross where they intersect with the vertical line."  Three sets of Greek symbols (numbers from the acrophonic system) are arranged along the left, right and bottom edges of the tablet.

Chinese Emperor Wang Mang instituted an unprecedented tax— the income tax —at the rate of 10 percent of profits, for professionals and skilled labor.

Previously, all Chinese taxes were either head taxes (poll taxes) or property taxes.

The European table abacus or reckoning table  became standardized to some extent by this time. The pebbles previously used as counters were replaced by specially minted coin-like objects that were cast, thrown, or pushed on the abacus table. They were called jetons from jeter (to throw) in France, and werpgeld for “thrown money” in Holland.

The anonymous Arte dell’Abbaco . . . on the operation of the abacus, printed in Treviso, Italy, probably by Gerardus de Lisa, de Flandria, is the first dated book on arithmetic. It is possible that some undated pamphlets on Algorithmus may predate this work.

"Frank J. Swetz translated the complete work using Smith's notes in 1987 in his Capitalism & Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century. Swetz used a copy of the Treviso housed in the Manuscript Library at Columbia University. The volume found its way to this collection via a curious route. Maffeo Pinelli (1785), an Italian bibliophile, is the first known owner. After his death his library was purchased by a London book dealer and sold at auction on February 6, 1790. The book was obtained for three shillings by Mr. [Michael] Wodhull. About 100 years later the Arithmetic appeared in the library of Brayton Ives, a New York lawyer. When Ives sold the collection of books at auction, George [Arthur] Plimpton, a New York publisher, acquired the Treviso and made it an acquisition to his extensive collection of early scientific [i.e. mathematics] texts. Plimpton donated his library to Columbia University in 1936. Original copies of the Treviso Arithmetic are extremely rare" (Wikipedia article Treviso Arithmetic, accessed 01-10-2009).

ISTC No. ia01141000.

Between November 10 and 20, 1494 Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli published at the press of Paganinus de Paganinis in Venice Summa de arithmetica geometria, proporzioni et proporzionalita. This was “the first great general work on mathematics printed” (Smith, Rara arithmetica, 56).

“[The Summa] contains a general treatise on theoretical and practical arithmetic; the elements of algebra; a table of moneys, weights and measures used in the various Italian states; a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping; and a summary of Euclid’s geometry. . . . Although it lacked originality, the Summa was widely circulated and studied by the mathematicians of the sixteenth century. Cardano, while devoting a chapter of his Practica arithmetice (1539) to correcting the errors in the Summa, acknowledged his debt to Pacioli. Tartaglia’s General trattato de’ numeri et misure (1556-1560) was styled on Pacioli’s Summa. In the introduction to his Algebra, Bombelli says that Pacioli was the first mathematician after Leonardo Fibonacci to have thrown light on the science of algebra. . . . Pacioli’s treatise on bookkeeping, ‘De computis et scripturis,’ contained in the Summa, was the first printed work setting out the ‘method of Venice,’ that is, double-entry bookkeeping. [Richard] Brown has said [in his History of Accounting and Accountants, 1905] that ‘The history of bookkeeping during the next century consists of little else than registering the progress of the De computis through the various countries of Europe” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

ISTC no. il00315000 points out the very unusual aspect of the edition that two re-issues of the first edition exist with some sheets reprinted. One of these is thought to date after 1509 and another after 13 August 1502. Nevertheless, these re-issues bear the original publication date.  

The Japanese adopted the Chinese 1/5 abacus via Korea. In Japanese the abacus is called soroban.

The 1/4 abacus appeared in Japan about 1630.

German astronomer Christoph Scheiner invented the pantograph. This was probably the first copying device. Scheiner did not publish an account of this invention until 25 years later, when he issued Pantographice in Rome, 1631.

A painting by Pieter Breughel the Younger, of which one copy dated 1621 entitled the Village Lawyer is in the Museum voor Schone Kunster, Ghent, Belgium, and another copy dated 1620-40, and entitled Paying the Tax is in the Armand Hammer collection at the Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, perhaps caricatures the way paper accounting or legal records were maintained at the time. Records are shown in piles of bundles on tables, in bundles on shelves, in what appears to be sacks of bundles hanging on walls, in sheets of paper bundled together that may be tacked up on walls, and in piles on the floor. In short the methods of organizing and storing information appear sloppy, inefficient, and possibly chaotic.

In Dissertations academiques. . . avec un discours sur. . . un cylindre arithmetique published in Paris Pierre Petit described an arithmetic cylinder, which he said was more affordable and easier to use than Pascal’s Pascaline.

English diplomat, mathematician and inventor Samuel Morland published in London The Description and Use of Two Arithmetic Instruments, the first monograph on a calculating machine published in English. The book described modifications to the Pascaline.

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas of Alsace, an entrepreneur in the insurance industry, invented the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine, presumably to speed up and make more accurate, the enormous amount of daily computation insurance companies required. Remarkably, according to the Wikipedia, Thomas received almost immediate acknowledgement for this invention, as he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor only one year later, in 1821.  At this time he changed his name to Charles Xavier Thomas, de Colmar, later abbreviated to Thomas de Colmar.

"Initially Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in between the first model of the Arithmometer introduced in 1820 and its true commercialization in 1852. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories just to name a few. The manufacturing of the Arithmometer went on for another 40 years until around 1914" (Wikipedia article on Charles Xavier Thomas, accessed 10-10-2011).

The success of the Arithmometer, which to a certain extent paralleled Thomas's success in the insurance industry, was, of course, in complete contrast to the problems that Charles Babbage faced with producing and gaining any acceptance for his vastly more sophisticated, complex, ambitious and expensive calculating engines during roughly the same time frame. Thomas, of course, produced an affordable product that succeeded in speeding up basic arithmetical operations essential to the insurance industry while Babbage's scientific and engineering goals initially of making mathematical tables more accurate, and later, of automating mathematical operations in general, did not attempt to meet a recognized industrial demand. 

"The [Arithmometer] mechanism has three parts, concerned with setting, counting, and recording respectively. Any number up to 999,999 may be set by moving the pointers to the numbers 0 to 9 engraved next to the six slots on the fixed cover plate. The movement of any of these pointers slides a small pinion with ten teeth along a square axle, underneath and to the left of which is a Leibniz stepped wheel.  

"The Leibniz wheel, a cylinder having nine teeth of increasing length, is driven from the main shaft by means of a bevel wheel, and the small pinion is thus rotated by as many teeth as the cylinder bears in the plane corresponding to the digit set. This amount of rotation is transferred through one of a pair of bevel wheels, carried on a sleeve on the same axis, to the ‘results’ figure wheel on the back row on the hinged plate. This plate also carried the figure wheel recording the number of turns of the driving crank for each position of the hinged plate. The pair of bevel wheels is placed in proper gear by setting a lever at the top left-hand cover to either "Addition and Multiplication" or "Subtraction and Division." The ‘results’ figure wheel is thereby rotated anti-clockwise or clockwise respectively.  

"Use. Multiplying 2432 by 598 may be performed as follows: Lift the hinged plate, turn and release the two milled knobs to bring all the figure wheels to show zero; lower the hinged plate in its position to the extreme left; set the number 2432 on the four slots on the fixed plate; set the lever on the left to "multiplication" and turn the handle eight times; lift the hinged plate, slide it one step to the right, and lower it into position; turn the handle nine times; step the plate one point to the right again and the turn the handle five times. The product 1,454,336 will then appear on the top row, and the multiplier 598 on the next row of figures" (From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

William Austin Burt of Detroit, Michigan invented an early typewriter, called the Typographer.

The machine that Burt invented was cumbersome and difficult to use. Writing a letter with Burt's "Typographer" took longer than writing by hand.

The Prudential Mutual Assurance, Investment and Loan Association was founded in Hatton Garden, London on May 30, 1848. The Prudential was the first of the great industrial life insurance companies that handled the insurance policies of millions of people, and processed an immense amount of data, initially by hand.

In London David Edward Hughes invented the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key caused the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver. Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln and the United States Congress and passed the Revenue Act of 1862, creating the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacting a progressive rate income tax to pay war expenses.

"Annual income above $600 was taxed at a 3% rate, but those earning over $10,000 per year were taxed at a 5% rate. This Act repealed the flat rate income tax that had been established by the Revenue Act of the previous year."

"To assure timely collection, income tax was 'withheld at the source' by the employer, with the Act specifying that Federal income tax was a temporary measure that would terminate in 'the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six' " (Wikipedia article on Revenue Act of 1862, accessed 12-27-2008).

American inventor, newspaper editor and politician Christopher Latham Sholes and Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden invented the first practical typewriter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was the first device to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

"Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a failure and he quickly abandoned the idea. He arrived at the typewriter through a different route. His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on. He began work on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.

"Sholes and Soule showed their machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wondered if the machine could not be made to produce letters and words as well. Further inspiration came in July 1867, when Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American describing the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John Pratt in England. Sholes decided that the pterotype was too complex and set out to make his own machine, whose name he got from the article: the typewriting machine, or typewriter.

"For this project, Soule was again enlisted, and Glidden joined them as a third partner who provided the funds. The Scientific American article had described a "literary piano"; the first model that the trio built had a keyboard literally resembling a piano. It had black keys and white keys, laid out in two rows. It did not contain keys for the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient:

3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

"with the first row made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework being wooden. It was in this form that Sholes, Glidden and Soule were granted patents for their invention on on June 23, 1868 and July 14. The first document to be produced on a typewriter was a contract that Sholes had written, in his capacity as the Comptroller for the city of Milwaukee. Machines similar to Sholes's had been previously used by the blind for embossing, but by Sholes's time the inked ribbon had been invented, which made typewriting in its current form possible" (Wikipedia article on Christopher Sholes, accessed 05-22-2009).

In 1872 the patent on the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer (U.S. 79,265) was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington & Sons, then famous as manufacturers of rifles and sewing machines.  Remington started production of their first typewriter on March 1, 1873 in Ilion, New York. The machines, as first produced, were problematic in their operation.

The action of the type bars in the early typewriters were very sluggish and tended to jam frequently. To fix this problem, Christopher Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Because typists at that time used the "hunt and peck" method, Sholes' arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had enough time to fall back into place before the next one came up. This new arrangement, which Sholes invented in 1873, was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard, and is still used today. Though Sholes had never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually 20 words per minute (WPM) or less, his invention with the QWERTY keyboard was the first machine to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

When produced  by Remington & Sons in 1874 Scholes improved machine was called the “Sholes & Glidden Type Writer.” It had a keyboard with letters and numbers arranged in a four-line pattern (known as QWERTY from the first six letters in the top row), a wooden spacer bar, and a vulcanized india-rubber platen or roller. It only printed capital letters.

About 5000 of the Sholes & Glidden Type Writers were sold between 1874 and 1878, when Remington & Sons introduced the Remington 2,  the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters via a shift key.

English travel agent Thomas Cook introduced "circular notes." This financial product became much better known through the American Express brand of traveler's cheques which were introduced in 1891.

About 1875 engineer Frank S. Baldwin of Philadelphia and Willgot Theophil Odhner, a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur working in St. Petersburg, Russia, independently invented calculators using a true variable-toothed gear. This was the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators were called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

Thomas Edison of Menlo Park, now Edison, New Jersey, invented the Electric Pen, the forerunner of the mimeograph.

Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus.

It took three hundred clerks working at The Prudential headquartered in London six months to review its 2,500,000 insurance policies with the assistance of twenty-four Thomas de Colmar arithmometers.

In 1878 the Remington Model 2 typewriter, produced by the Remington Typewriter Co. of Ilion, New York, introduced a shift key, allowing the typing of both upper and lower case letters.

James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio patented a cash register. It had a large display to record money received and a locked drawer to hold cash receipts.

At the U.S. Census Bureau physician John Shaw Billings, founder and librarian of the Surgeons General's Library (now the National Library of Medicine), suggested to Herman Hollerith that there ought to be a machine for speeding up the process of tabulating population and similar statistics. 

Hollerith credited Billings for inspiring him to develop electric punched card tabulating for the census of 1890.

John H. Patterson of Dayton, Ohio, and his associates acquired the Ritty patents on the cash register, and established the National Cash Register Company (NCR).

Thomas Edison, who had invented in the electric pen in 1876, agreed to sell his patents for this device to Albert Blake Dick, who had invented the mimeograph stencil.

Edison also agreed to help Dick market the mimeograph under the name, Edison Mimeograph. Marketed by the AB Dick company of Chicago, the mimeograph became the first widely used office duplicating machine.

American inventor Dorr E. Felt introduced the Comptometer, a non-printing key-driven calculating machine whose chief advantages were speed, versatility, and ease of use.

"Use. For each digit a push button from 1 to 9 is selected which rotates a Pascal-type wheel with the corresponding number of increments. Numbers are subtracted by adding the complement (shown in smaller numbers). The carrying of tens is accomplished by power generated by the action of the keys and stored in a helical spring, which is automatically released at the proper instant to perform the carry.  

"Through effective marketing and training of skilled operators versed in complement arithmetic at Comptometer Schools, these machines became the workhorse of the accounting profession in the first part of the [20th] century. They never successfully advanced into the electro-mechanical era, but remained purely mechanical, two-function adding and subtracting machines" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

In his utopian novel Looking Backward published in Boston describing life in the year 2000  Edward Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times—the first description of the use of a card for purchases.

"The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up one hundred and thirteen years later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia. The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes are the dangers of the stock market, the use of credit cards, the benefits of a socialist legal system, music, and the use of an "industrial army" to make tasks run smoother.

"The young man readily finds a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age; including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, Internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens. The productive capacity of America is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.

"Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology or the economy in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual economic and technological developments. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club like BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club. He additionally introduces a concept of credit cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26, but these bear no resemblance to the instruments of debt-finance. All citizens receive an equal amount of "credit." Those with more difficult, specialized, dangerous or unpleasant jobs work fewer hours. Bellamy also predicts both sermons and music being available in the home through cable "telephone". Bellamy labeled the philosophy behind the vision "nationalism", and his work inspired the formation of more than 160 Nationalist Clubs to propagate his ideas"(Wikipedia article on Looking Backward, accessed 02-07-2012)

In 1889 American statistician Herman Hollerith of Georgetown, Washington, D. C. was a awarded three patents (U.S. Patent 395,781, U.S. Patent 395,782, U.S. Patent 395,783) for an electromechanical machine for tabulating information stored on punched cards.  

"These patents described both paper tape and rectangular cards as possible recording media. The card shown in U.S. Patent 395,781 of June 8 was preprinted with a template and had holes arranged close to the edges so they could be reached by a railroad conductor's ticket punch, with the center reserved for written descriptions. Hollerith was originally inspired by railroad tickets that let the conductor encode a rough description of the passenger:  

"I was traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a punch photograph...the conductor...punched out a description of the individual, as light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc. So you see, I only made a punch photograph of each person." 

"Use of the ticket punch proved tiring and error prone, so Hollerith invented a pantograph 'keyboard punch' that allowed the entire card area to be used. It also eliminated the need for a printed template on each card, instead a master template was used at the punch; a printed reading board could be placed under a card that was to be read manually. Hollerith envisioned a number of card sizes. In an article he wrote describing his proposed system for tabulating the 1890 U.S. Census, Hollerith suggested a card 3 inches by 5½ inches of Manila stock "would be sufficient to answer all ordinary purposes."  

"The cards used in the 1890 census had round holes, 12 rows and 24 columns. A reading board for these cards can be seen at the Columbia University Computing History site. At some point, 31⁄4 by 73⁄8 inches (82.550 by 187.325 mm) became the standard card size, a bit larger than the United States one-dollar bill of the time (the dollar was changed to its current size in 1929). The Columbia site says Hollerith took advantage of available boxes designed to transport paper currency. Hollerith's original system used an ad-hoc coding system for each application, with groups of holes assigned specific meanings, e.g. sex or marital status. Later designs standardized the coding, with twelve rows, where the lower ten rows coded digits 0 through 9. This allowed groups of holes to represent numbers that could be added, instead of simply counting units " Wikipedia article on Punched Cards, accessed 12-21-2011).

Hollerith's electric punched card tabulator was used in the 1890 United States census — the first major data-processing project to use electrical machinery. It reduced data-processing time by 80 percent over manual methods. 

In 1892 American inventor William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, founder of the American Arithmometer Company (1886; (Burroughs Adding Machine Company 1904) began commercial production of his dependable key-driven printing adding machine.

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator, about the size of a small desk top, was introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" was the first commercially successful calculator that could perform multiplication directly, rather than by repeated addition. It was designed by Otto Steiger, a Swiss engineer and was first patented in Germany in 1892. Patents were issued in France, Switzerland, Canada and the USA in 1893. Production by Hans W. Egli of Zurich started in 1893, and continued to 1935. Most models were driven by hand-crank but some were electrified.

Roughly 4000-5000 Millionaires were sold. 

Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, the world's first electric tabulating and accounting machine company.

This eventually evolved into IBM.

To improve data processing of the 1900 census, American statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith added an automatic card feed to his electric punched card tabulating machine. 

In 1911 Herman Hollerith sold his Tabulating Machine Company to Charles R. Flint.

Russian-born James Powers, an engineer hired by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1907 to help the government avoid what were perceived as excessive charges by Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, managed to avoid patent infringement and created a faster, cheaper electric punched card tabulating machine that was compatible with Hollerith's punched card format. Powers then formed a corporation in Newark, New Jersey to manufacture and sell his device. Originally known as the Powers Tabulating Machine Company, the company changed its name to Powers Accounting Machine Company in order to target a wider market.  

In 1927 Powers' company was merged with the Remington Typewriter Company and Rand Kardex to form Remington Rand.

Charles R. Flint, a noted trust organizer, merged Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with the Computing Scale Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), producing and selling Hollerith tabulating equipment, time clocks, and other business machinery. The new company was based in Endicott, New York and had 1300 employees.

In 1924 CTR became International Business Machines (IBM).

Brunsviga of Braunschweig, Germany boasted that they sold twenty thousand calculators based on the variable-toothed gear technology.

Anthropologist Leslie Leland Locke published "The Ancient Quipu, A Peruvian Knot Record," American Anthropologist, New Series I4 (1912) 325-332.

This was the first work to show how the Inca (Inka) Empire and its predecessor societies used the quipu (Khipu) for mathematical and accounting records in the decimal system. Locke stated his conclusions as follows:

"1. These knots were used purely for numerical purposes.

"2. Distances from the main cord were used roughly to locate the orders, which were on a decimal scale.

"3. The quipu was not used for counting or calculating but for record keeping. The mode of tying the knots was not adapted to counting, and there was ne need of its use for such a purpose, as the Quichua language contained a complete and adequate system of numeration.

"4. Other specimens examined contain the same types of knots there being but ten variations in all, two forms for the single knot and eight long knots. These eight differen from each other and from the single knot only in the number of turns taken in tying. There is nothing about any specimen examined to give the slightest suggesion that it was used for any other than numerical purposes.

"5. If the hypothesis that this quipu is a record of the same classes of objects be correct, it would seem to indicate the colors in this case have no special significance, but were taken according to the fancy or convenience of the maker. This does not signify that there was not a rough color scheme in sue for some purposes.

"6. These specimens confirm in a remarkable way the accuracy with which [the Inca] Garcilasso [de la Vega] described the manners and customs of his people."

In 1923 Locke published an expanded version of his research in a monograph entitled The Ancient Quipu or Peruvian Knot Record.

Research on this topic was further advanced by mathematician Marcia Ascher and anthropologist Robert Ascher in Code of the Quipu. A Study of Media, Mathematics, and Culture (1981).

Thomas J. Watson became president of Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, and focused the company on electric card-tabulating equipment for businesses.

800,000 Burroughs calculating machines were sold worldwide by 1919.

Thomas J. Watson, president of CTR (Computer Tabulating Recording Corporation), of Endicott, New York, changed the name of the company to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

"Encouraged by George F. Johnson, who saw Endicott as the world's first industrial 'park' with a 'Square Deal' for everyone, IBM began building a factory complex in Endicott just to the east of the Endicott-Johnson factories. The original Bundy building (a Binghamton company) was erected on North Street as early as 1906 and stands to this day. Many of the IBM factory buildings, including Factory #1 and the IBM Schoolhouse, still stand to this day. Endicott was the original location of all IBM manufacturing, research, and development from the early 1920s through World War II" (Wikipedia article on Endicott, New York, accessed 02-18-2012).

American industrialist James Henry Rand, Jr. merged Rand-Kardex with Remington Typewriters and several other office supply companies to form Remington Rand.

IBM adopted the eighty-column punched card, the standard for about the next fifty years, and one of IBM's most profitable products.

Astronomer and mechanical computation pioneer Leslie J. Comrie working in London discovered how to use a commercial accounting machine as a difference engine.

With this technique Comrie reformed the production of the Nautical Almanac.

In 1933 IBM marketed the first commercially successful electric typewriter, the Electromatic.

IBM produced electric typewriters until 1990.

The Social Security Act of 1935 required the U. S. government to keep continuous records on the employment of 26 million individuals.

The first  Social Security Numbers (SSNs) were issued by the Social Security Administration in November 1936 as part of the New Deal Social Security program.

"Within three months, 25 million numbers were issued.

"Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether." (Wikipedia article on Social Security Number, accessed 01-17-2010).

The Charga-Plate bookkeeping system, a precursor of the credit card issued by Charga-Plate Group, Inc. New York, was utilized during this period and somewhat later.

"It was a 2 1/2" x 1 1/4" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tag, that was embossed with the customer's name, city and state (no address). It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in the imprinter first, then a charge slip on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers" (Wikipedia article on Credit card, accessed 12-26-2008).

IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen (Dehomag) introduced the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator, incorporating internal instructions programmed with a plug board.

Kistermann, "The way to the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator: The 1935 DEHOMAG D 11 tabulator," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing XVII (1995): 33-49.

American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney Chester F. Carlson invented xerography, originally called electrophotography in Astoria, Queens, New York. Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring proportional spacing.

By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page.

Mathematician and computing pioneer Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company in Boston, wrote a report on the possible application of George Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator for insurance-company calculations.

In 1949 the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York introduced the Model A xerographic copier, the first commercial electrophotographic copier. 

"Manually operated, it was also known as the Ox Box. An improved version, Camera #1, was introduced in 1950" (Wikipedia article on Xerox 914, accessed 04-21-2009).

The company renamed itself Haloid Xerox in 1958, and shortened its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.

The Diners Club issued the first "general purpose" credit card, invented by Diners Club founder Frank X. McNamara. The card allowed members to charge the cost of restaurant bills only.

"The first credit card charge was made on February 8, 1950, by Frank McNamara, Ralph Schneider and Matty Simmons at Major's Cabin Grill, a restaurant adjacent to their offices in the Empire State Building" (Wikipedia article on Diners Club International, accessed 02-28-2012).

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) ran a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England.  The LEO adaptation of the EDSAC was the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

Richard W. Appel and other students at Harvard Business school issued Electronic Business Mchines: A New Tool for Management.

This was the first report on the application of electronic computers to business. The report was issued before any electronic computer was delivered to an American corporation. (See Reading 10.4.)

UNIVAC I, serial 8, was installed at General Electric Appliance Park, Louisville, Kentucky. Serial 8 was the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States. It ran the "first successful industrial payroll application."

Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, began the computerization of the banking industry by demonstrating a prototype electronic accounting machine using its ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system.

MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading) was demonstrated to the Bank Management Committee of the American Bankers’ Association.

Bank of America created the BankAmericard, the first credit card issued by a conventional bank.

Together with its overseas affiliates, this product eventually evolved into the Visa system.

American Express launched the American Express card.

Because American Express previously had an international network of offices in place, and their traveler's' cheques had been accepted throughout the world for decades, this was the first credit card accepted internationally. 

". . . public interest had become so significant that they issued 250,000 cards prior to the official launch date. The card was launched with an annual fee of $6, $1 higher than Diners Club, to be seen as a premium product. The first cards were paper, with the account number and cardmember's name typed. It was not until 1959 that American Express began issuing embossed ISO 7810 plastic cards, an industry first" (Wikipedia article on American Express, accessed 12-27-2008).

Based on technology originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute, General Electric delivered the first 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America.

The system used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading.) ERMA served as the Bank’s accounting computer and check handling system until 1970.

The United States banking industry adopted MICR, (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), which allowed computers to read the data printed on checks.

Haloid Xerox, Rochester, New York, introduced the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, was introduced.

Quotron became popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of traditional ticker tape.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began using social security numbers as tax ID numbers.

IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

The New York Stock Exchange completed automation of its basic trading functions.

The IRS completed computerization of income-tax processing, with a central facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and satellite locations around the United States.

Texas Instruments filed the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) was awarded on June 25, 1974.

This miniature calculator employed a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

In 1968 German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup of Stuttgart and Jürgen Dethloff, of Hamburg, invented the smart card (chip card, or integrated circuit card [ICC]) and applied for the patent. The patent for the smart card was finally granted to both inventors in 1982. The first wide use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones—France Telecom Télécarte—starting in 1983-84.

In 1969 or 1970 the first automatic teller machine (ATM) was installed. Dates conflict as to whether this was in 1969 or slightly later. The first machine installed at Chemical Bank in New York may have been only a cash dispenser.

The first test of magnetic stripe transaction card technology developed by IBM occurred at the American Airlines terminal at Chicago's O'Hare Airport with the Automatic Ticket Vendor.

Reference: Computer History Museum, Jerome Svigals donation, "Automatic Ticket Vendor Press Kit", October 30, 1969. X3951.2007.

Though the test at O'Hare Airport was successful the airline did not implement the technology because of a recession. IBM patented the technology, but did not announce its availability until 1973.

Gary Starkweather at Xerox PARC invented the laser printer by modifying a Xerox copier.

The Universal Product Code (UPC)—the familiar barcode—was accepted by a grocer’s trade association. It was developed by George J. Laurer of IBM.

Mead Data Central of Miamisburg, Ohio, introduced the Lexis and NAARS services.

"LEXIS provides the full text of Ohio and New York codes and cases, the U.S. code, and some federal case law. NAARS is the National Automated Accounting Research Service, a tax database from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants."

The Federal Government’s antitrust suit against IBM went to trial. The complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York on January 17, 1969 by the Justice Department. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business.

Wang Laboratories, Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced its VS minicomputer system, which became, for a time, one of the most popular office systems, "inaugurating the concept of office automation."

Dan Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, and Bob Frankston wrote Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helped dispel the notion that the Apple II was only a toy for hobbyists. The PC version of Visicalc was called "the first killer app" for the PC.

Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, founded Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''

In January 1983 Mitch Kapor's Lotus Development Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts released Lotus 1-2-3. An integrated spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager, it became the first "killer app" for the PC. In 1983 sales of 1-2-3 reached $54,000,000, making Lotus the largest independent software vendor in the world.

The IRS began electronic tax filing (e-filing) to lower operating costs and paper usage, using the processing system developed in 1969 by the IRS,

The United States Internal Revenue Service began programming and development of CADE (Customer Account Data Engine), first discussed in the IRS Modernization Plan of 2000.

"The original operational date was set at Nov 1st 2006. Programming and development began in 2003 but actual processing on the system was delayed until 2005. The system initially processed only 1040EZ tax returns, the simplest type of electronic tax returns. In 2006 the capacity was increased for the system to begin processing a limited number of more complex 1040 forms and other support forms. In 2007 the system began to process Schedule C forms and other more complex tax forms.

"Because the system is still unable to handle the full load of IRS tax returns, a hybrid approach is used by the IRS with the overwhelming majority of tax returns still being processed with the old system. Current processing loads and returns done by CADE are used for testing purposes to determine the systems functionality.

"The system, although beset by regular set backs due to funding, is expected to be fully operational by 2012" (Wikipedia article on Customer Account Data Engine, accessed 12-27-2008).

Anthropologists Gary Urton and Carrie Brezine published "Khipu Accounting in Ancient Peru," Science 309 (2005) 1065 - 1067.

"Khipu [quipu] are knotted-string devices that were used for bureaucratic recording and communication in the Inka [Inca] Empire. We recently undertook a computer analysis of 21 khipu from the Inka administrative center of Puruchuco, on the central coast of Peru. Results indicate that this khipu archive exemplifies the way in which census and tribute data were synthesized, manipulated, and transferred between different accounting levels in the Inka administrative system" (Science).

"Researchers in the US believe they have come closer to solving a centuries-old mystery - by deciphering knotted string used by the ancient Incas.

"Experts say one bunch of knots appears to identify a city, marking the first intelligible word from the extinct South American civilisation.

"The coloured, knotted pieces of string,known as khipu, are believed to have been used for accounting information.

"The researchers say the finding could unlock the meaning of other khipu.

"Harvard University researchers Gary Urton and Carrie Brezine used computers to analyse 21 khipu.

"They found a three-knot pattern in some of the strings which they believe identifies the bunch as coming from the city of Puruchuco, the site of an Inca palace.

" 'We hypothesize that the arrangement of three figure-eight knots at the start of these khipu represented the place identifier, or toponym, Puruchuco,' they wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.

" 'We suggest that any khipu moving within the state administrative system bearing an initial arrangement of three figure-eight knots would have been immediately recognisable to Inca administrators as an account pertaining to the palace of Puruchuco.' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4143968.stm, accessed 04-28-2009).