‎"IBM.‎
‎Electric Punched Card Accounting Machines. Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction. Card Sorting Machine 82-80-75.‎

‎New York, International Business Machines Corporation, (1957). Royal8vo. Bound in the original printed grey wrappers. Minor wear to extremities, otherwise a very nice and clean copy. 84 pp. (herein 3 plates included) + large folded unattached diagram.‎

Reference : 42871

‎Original scarce printing of the engineering manual to the IBM 75, 80 and 82 Card Sorting Machine.In the 40ties and 50ties a major time consuming activity was sorting of information represented by punched cards. IBM was the leading manufacturer of the card sorting machine and the company was founded by Herman Hollerith on the basis of his 1901 Hollerith Automatic Horizontal Sorter.The two main requirements of the Card Sorting Machine were lowering of error risk and sorting speed. Both features were continuously improved which resulted in a number of different issue of the engineering manual.""The three machines necessary to perform the basic operations required in punched card accounting are the punch, the sorter, and the accounting machine. The punch establishes the records, the sorter arranges or classifies them, and the accounting machine produces the printed reports."" (From the introduction to the present manual).The 1957-manual gives a fascinating insight into how a fully development card sorting machine is developed and how it functioned.OOC 694. (the 1952-issue).‎