<P> In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated (via stock acquisition) to form a fifth company, the Computing - Tabulating - Recording Company (CTR). The Powers Accounting Machine Company was formed that same year and, like Hollerith, with machines first developed at the Census Bureau . In 1919 the first Bull tabulator prototype was developed . Tabulators that could print, and with removable control panels, appeared in the 1920s . In 1924 CTR was renamed International Business Machines (IBM). In 1927 Remington Rand acquires the Powers Accounting Machine Company . In 1933 The Tabulating Machine Company was subsumed into IBM . These companies continued to develop faster and more sophisticated tabulators, culminating in tabulators such as the 1949 IBM 407 and the 1952 Remington Rand 409 . Tabulating machines continued to be used well after the introduction of commercial electronic computers in the 1950s . </P> <P> 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 . </P> <P> In its basic form, a tabulating machine would read one card at a time, print portions (fields) of the card on fan-fold paper, possibly rearranged, and add one or more numbers punched on the card to one or more counters, called accumulators . On early models, the accumulator register dials would be read manually after a card run to get totals . Later models could print totals directly . Cards with a particular punch could be treated as master cards causing different behavior . For example, customer master cards could be merged with sorted cards recording individual items purchased . When read by the tabulating machine to create invoices, the billing address and customer number would be printed from the master card, and then individual items purchased and their price would be printed . When the next master card was detected, the total price would be printed from the accumulator and the page ejected to the top of the next page, typically using a carriage control tape . </P> <P> With successive stages or cycles of punched - card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made if one had a sufficient set of equipment . (In modern data processing terms, one can think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY for totals and counts, then a SORT BY; and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed .) A human operator had to retrieve, load, and store the various card decks at each stage . </P>

In which form the input was fed into tabulating machines
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