Giant brains; or, Machines that think

by Edmund Callis Berkeley

The calculating punch was introduced in 1946. It is a versatile machine of considerable capacity. It adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides. It also has a control over a sequence of operations, in some cases up to half a dozen steps.

This machine ([Fig. 11]) has one card channel with 4 stations called, respectively, control brushes, reading brushes, punch feed, and punching dies. At station 1, there are 20 brushes; we can set these by hand to read any 20 of the 80 card columns. At station 2 there are 80 regular reading brushes. At station 3 the card waits for a part of a second while the machine calculates, and, when that is done, the card is fed into station 4, where it is punched or verified. The multiplying punch is an earlier model of the calculating punch, without the capacity for division.

Fig. 11. Calculating punch.

Tabulator

The tabulator can select and list information from cards. Also, it can total information from groups of cards in counters of the tabulator and can print the totals.

Fig. 12. Tabulator.

The tabulator ([Fig. 12]) has one card channel with two stations where cards may be read, called the Upper Brushes and Lower Brushes. When the Lower Brush station is reading one card, the Upper Brush station is reading the next card. The tabulator also has another channel, which is for endless paper (and sometimes separate sheets or cards). This channel has one station; here printing takes place. Unlike the typewriter, the tabulator prints a whole row at a time. It can print up to 88 numerals or letters across the sheet in one stroke. The cards flowing through the card channel and the paper flowing through the paper channel do not have to move in step; in fact, we need many different time relations between them, and the number of rows printed on the paper may have almost any relation to the number of punch cards flowing through the card channel.

At the station where paper is printed, we can put on the machine a mechanism called the automatic carriage. This is like a typewriter carriage, which holds the paper for a typewriter, but we can control the movement of paper through the automatic carriage by plugboard wiring, switch settings, and holes in punch cards. Thus we can arrange for headings, spacing, and feeding of new sheets to be controlled by the information and the instructions, with a great deal of versatility.