Design Features of Remington Rand Speed Tally
John L. Hill · afips · 1899
Tallying, the recording of the number of occurrences of specific events, although basically a simple repetitive act, has somehow failed to become mechanized in the general trend toward relieving humans of the drudgery of paper work. A tremendous amount of event counting is still recorded in the tally records of modern business establishments in the symbols of the ancients, the four strokes and slash. This system is used especially when the number of different events being tallied is large. It is true that the ticket taker has his thumb-operated counter and the baseball umpire his finger-operated wheels for balls and strikes, but as the number of events grows, the mechanism fails to keep pace. The Electronic Statistical machine has 62 counters and another company makes an analysis machine equipped with 80, but for the problems at hand in the field of merchandising, neither of these is at all adequate. Tens of thousands of counters are required if record of the movement of merchandise bought and sold by even a small mail-order house is to be maintained.