Computer, 4th Edition

2 The Mechanical Office

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263272-4

IN 1928 THE WORLD’S top four office-machine suppliers were Remington Rand, with annual sales of $60 million; National Cash Register (NCR), with sales of $50 million; the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, with $32 million worth of business; and – trailing the three leaders by a considerable margin – IBM, with an income of $20 million. Forty years later those same firms were among the top ten computer manufacturers, and of the four, IBM, whose sales exceeded those of the other three combined, was the third-largest corporation in the world, with annual revenues of $21 billion and a workforce of a third of a million people.

To understand the development of the computer industry, and how this ...