IBM's last tabulator last unitrecord punch card machine 485

SNIP I can't answer when the last IBM tabulator rolled off of the production line, but I do remember that the company where I started and trained as a computer programmer in 1973(?) in London (England) still used tabulators to calculate the payroll.

The payroll system was deemed to be "to complex" for the computer and, I buttume, that the tabulators had been doing the job successfully for a considerable time.

The payroll was complex in that there were several payrolls - Weekly (Thursday), Weekly (Froday), Fortnightly, 4-weekly and Monthly.

The company was running a pair of ICT 1301s to process their work (Life butturance) and had an ICL 1904A which was being phased in with new, and better, systems to replace the 1301s. I don't know the make of tabulator.

Another organisation that I worked for later on still used a mechanical 'balancer', which printed and totaled designated (by plugboard) columns of punch cards. When the total had been printed, the cards were then fed into a system written in Nicol running on an ICL 1901A and amended and re-fed until the computer total matched that from the 'balancer'.

The system was moved to run under George 3 on a 1904S, the only changes being that the cards were 'punched' on a KeyEdit (key-to-disc) system, which could also total columns, transfered by magnetic tape to a card image file on the 1904S and then the same programs run. Instead of cards being re-punched, the card image file was editted via a terminal.