Powers-Samas was a British company which sold

unit record equipment Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, well before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using electromechanical machines collectively referred to as unit record equipment, electric accounting machines (EAM) or ...

. In 1915 Powers Tabulating Machine Company established European operations through the Accounting and Tabulating Machine Company of Great Britain Limited, in 1929 renamed Powers-Samas Accounting Machines Limited (Samas, full name Societe Anonyme des Machines a Statistiques, had been the Powers' sales agency in France, formed in 1922). The informal reference "Acc and Tab" would persist. During the Second World War it produced large numbers of Typex cipher machines, derived from the German

Enigma Enigma may refer to: *Riddle, someone or something that is mysterious or puzzling Biology *ENIGMA, a class of gene in the LIM domain Computing and technology * Enigma (company), a New York-based data-technology startup * Enigma machine, a family ...

, for use by the British armed forces and other government departments. In 1959 it merged with the competing

British Tabulating Machine Company __NOTOC__ The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) was a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed some 200 "bombes", machines used at Bletchle ...

(BTM) to form

International Computers and Tabulators International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. I ...

(ICT).

Description

Powers-Samas machines detected the holes in

punched cards A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

mechanically, unlike IBM equipment where holes in punched cards are detected by electrical circuits. Pins that could drop through round holes in punched cards were connected to linkages and their displacement when a hole was present actuated other parts of the machine to produce the desired results. Setting up a machine involved building a suitable network of linkages. According to one user, this:

was achieved by locating above the reading block, in contact with the tops of the matrix pins, a removable Y-shaped 'connection box' (equivalent to the Hollerith plug board) which was hard-wired to the job. The box had at the base as many rods as were needed to read the positions within the used data fields, so that, when forced down, appropriate features of the machine - printheads, counters or control links were physically set as a reaction to the moving tops of the connecting box rods. Thus while many connection wires were straight-through, some sensed holes needed to allow multiple actuation, while some multiple code-punching needed to be combined to achieve a single purpose. Designing the system, including setting up the tabulator, was the sales engineers job, while soldering the 'conn-box' forest of cranked rods to meet the design requirement was down to the skill of the Powers Engineer who was thus the doyen of the machine room.email from Robin Hill, Norrk?ping, Sweden, 2005, to the computermuseum.org.uk
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Powers-Samas used a variety of card sizes and formats, including 21, 36, 40, 45, 65 and 130 column cards. The 40-column card, measuring 4.35 by 2 inches, was the most common.40-column card at Computer History Museum
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Description

Notes

Further reading