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Punched Cards come from the USA ……

By Lars Heide

The punched cards technology – the predecessor of EDP – was developed in the USA in the 1880s. During the first many years the cards were primarily used for statistics and only in the early 1950s did the National Giro Centre and the telephone companies begin to use punched cards for payments.


The punched cards technology was developed in the USA for a census; and very successfully so. Indeed, the first use of punched cards in Denmark was for the census in 1911; soon followed by several statistic tasks in the Danish Employers' Confederation and a number of insurance companies. During the interwar period punched cards were primarily considered a tool for handling statistics based on large amounts of data. Only after the 2nd World War did punched cards become important in accounts departments.

The First Punched Card Giro Inpayment Forms

At the National Giro Centre the first punched cards did not appear until 1956 in the shape of giro inpayment forms. They made it possible to mechanize the flow of work. Especially insurance and telephone companies were now able to have their payment lists sorted according to policy or telephone numbers.

This facilitated the checking of payments a lot, but the introduction of punched cards did not affect the accounts department of the National Giro Centre. The two parts of the process were only integrated after the change-over to EDP which took place gradually from 1966 together with optical form reading, and they now returned to only handling forms. This eased the work at the post offices besides being an advantage to the customers.

Instead of a physical machine sorting of punched card giro inpayment forms, e.g. the insurance companies had their needs for sorting of the incoming information fulfilled by putting this information on magnetic tapes. At the end of a term of payment the insurance companies could then either issue an entire list of payment in numerical order or a magnetic tape with the payments.

Telephone Bills were Labour-Intensive

At the Municipal Telephone Company of Funen, Jutland Telephone Company Ltd., and Copenhagen Telephone Company Ltd. it was a big, onerous administrative task to make up and issue telephone bills and to monitor payments.

Originally, all telephone calls were manually operated. After each call the telephone operator wrote out a coupon. The number/length of the calls was made up by summing up the coupons manually and writing the result on the bills.

Due to the increasing number of subscribers, the work load grew considerably, and from 1950 the telephone companies changed to issuing bills by means of punched cards.

Three large punched card files formed the basis of the subscribers’ accounts: The subscribers file and the two files with cards for calls and miscellaneous. The calls cards were used for making up the consumption of calls with the individual subscriber. Until the transition to direct distance dialling from 1950s this was still done manually. With the transition the making up took place at the exchange. The meters were photographed every three months and the charge was calculated on basis of this.

When the telephone companies changed to EDP from 1965, the extensive, physical handling disappeared and was replaced with magnetic tapes.



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