Following The 1890 Census
The advantages of the technology were immediately apparent for accounting and tracking inventory. Hollerith started his own business in 1896, founding the Tabulating Machine Company. In that year he introduced the Hollerith Integrating Tabulator, which could add numbers coded on cards, not just count the number of holes. Cards were still read manually using the pins and mercury pool reader. 1900 saw the Hollerith Automatic Feed Tabulator used in that year's U.S. census. A control panel was incorporated in the 1906 Type 1.
In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR). Tabulators that could print, and with removable control panels, appeared in the 1920s. In 1924 CTR was renamed International Business Machines (IBM). IBM continued to develop faster and more sophisticated tabulators, culminating in the 1949 IBM 407. Tabulating machines continued to be used well after the introduction of commercial electronic computers in the 1950s.
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 vs. programming language coding sheet relationships.
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