ABSTRACT
In the first half of the twentieth century, business information processing was increasingly performed by office workers equipped with office machines. The most important of these machines were typewriters, adding and accounting machines, filing systems, and punched-card equipment. There were many firms that made this equipment, but the four of them dominated the industry: Remington Rand, Burroughs, National Cash Register (NCR), and IBM. The biggest of the four was Remington Rand, formed by the merger of Remington Typewriter and Rand Ledger, a manufacturer of filing systems, in 1927. The Burroughs Adding Machine Company was formed in 1885 by William Burroughs, the inventor of the adder-lister. NCR – originally the National Cash Register Company – was formed in 1884 and dominated the sales of cash registers before entering the accounting machine market in the 1920s. The smallest of the firms was IBM, which manufactured punched-card machines. After World War II, these firms transitioned to producing electronic computers. However, of the four it was the smallest, IBM, that came to dominate the early computer industry.
