As a young lad I was always fascinated with the business calculators in use at the family owned lumber yard and contracting business. I suspect Grandpa Country was a bit of a geek at heart, as he invested wisely in these sorts of pieces of technology. For example, the Accounts Receivables at the store were maintained in house, originally using a Burroughs Bookkeeping machine purchased in the 1950s. I never saw this machine, but being the dork I was and continue to be, I could tell which entries on old ledger cards were made with this machine, just by the way the printing appeared on the cards.
In 1972 (I tracked down the exact date by the change in dated entries on the older ledger cards), the Burroughs machine was replaced by an NCR Class 160 Bookkeeping Machine.
I can easily remember this bookkeeping machine, as it’s what was in use when I did the accounts receivable for the family after Grandma Country retired but before my aunt took over the duties for the family business. I learned how this machine worked by watching Grandma Country do the invoice posting every morning during summer vacation. I found the machine fascinating. It was replaced by a computer in 1990 or so, running software I wrote that basically replicated the functions of this wonderful piece of technology.
Grandpa invested in the right tools and that’s something I learned from him.
The store didn’t have a proper cash register of the time, much to the chagrin of my technological ways. Instead, there was a very large “black box” built into the sales counter. The box had a tractor-fed stream of blank invoices that were there for handwritten detail, and a journal tape where we wrote the sub total of the sale, followed by a dash, and then the amount of tax charged on the sale. When the lever was pulled to advance this journal tape, the cash register drawer popped open. At least, until that functionality was disabled because of the amount of paper wasted just to pop open the drawer in a “No Sale” situation.
All of the calculations were performed on adding machines/calculators made by Monroe Systems for Business. We had a few of these machines scattered around the business, one in the back office, one on the sales counter etc. Because they were so robust and had some nifty features for their day, they lasted for literally decades. In fact, the Monroe 525 calculator, purchased in the mid 1970s, lasted until the store was sold to a new buyer in 2010.
For the back office there were printing models of these Monroe machines and they were the closest thing we had to something like a cash register.
Today I did a little search on Monroe Systems for Business and found that they’ve continued the tradition of quality calculating products, and the robust functionality is present in their equipment over 50 years later.
I was happy to see the layout of the keyboard is nearly the same as it has been for decades, and the approach to separating multiplication/division functions from the add/subtract/accumulator functions is intact.
My geek heart is happy. I might have to get my hands on one of these machines for my office.
