1893 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) B. 185 228 The pressure in the large systemic veins becomes raised during vagus action, because the quantity of blood which passes from them into the right ventricle (which we may refer to as the ‘input’ of the heart), in a given time, is diminished.

1929 Prosp. Mona Copper Co. 7 In addition to the large ore-bodies above water level waiting attack, the New Discovery Lode will soon add its important quota. The additional plant to deal with an in-put of 600 tons daily would require £20,000.

1929 Prosp. Mona Copper Co. 6 With Copper at £70 per ton on the basis of an input of 600 tons daily..a gross annual profit of about £100,000 could be expected.

1966 T. Lupton Managem. & Social Sci. iv. 88 To Rice..an organization is an ‘open system’. It takes in inputs from the environment, converts them, and sends outputs back into the environment.

1971 Sci. Amer. Sept. 111/1 These carcasses are retrieved in the spring, and the meat is considered one of the more flavorsome food inputs.

1971 J. B. Carroll et al. Word Frequency Bk. p. vi The Corpus is drawn from written, and edited, published materials. There is no direct oral input.

1902 Encycl. Brit. XXVII. 574/2 The useful return or ‘output’ at the terminals of a large machine may amount to as much as 95 per cent. of the mechanical energy which forms the ‘input’.

1926 R. W. Hutchinson First Course Wireless xi. 186 Care must be taken in arranging..the relative positions of wires, etc. on the input (grid) and output (plate) sides of the valve.

1928 C. F. S. Gamble Story N. Sea Air Station xix. 317 A more efficient hull and a higher speed for the same power ‘input’.

1931 Daily Express 21 Sept. 7/4 An advanced form of band-pass tuning, providing a special selector circuit between the input from the aerial and the first valve of the set.

1933 E. T. A. Rapson Electr. Transmission & Distrib. xiv. 163 Accurate metering of the power input to and output from the Grid is essential.

1943 C. L. Boltz Basic Radio xiv. 216 The input is applied between control grid and cathode.

1970 J. Earl How to choose Tuners & Amplifiers vi. 142 This same switch also receives an input from the a.m. section.

1926 J. D. Black Production Econ. iii. xi. 277 The term input..will be used..to refer to the amounts of the production elements that are used in turning out any product... In the present illustration, as the inputs of seed increase,..the outputs of grain increase.

1947 Bull. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics No. 913. 11 Most persons, in using the term ‘productivity’, have meant the physical output obtained for a given physical input.

1953 P. O. Steiner & W. Goldner Productivity ii. 5 What do we mean by input? A typical product is a combination of raw materials, machinery, workers' time, power, and many other factors. Each of these is called an input. Input items are combined in the manufacturing process into products or output. Should the unit of input be one worker, or one hour of labor time, or one machine, or a ton of raw materials or a kilowatt hour of electricity? Any of these could be an input although each is different.

1958 Economist 15 Nov. 592/3 When the effect of other variables has been allowed for, the farmer is found to be using, even at low inputs, 4s. worth of concentrates to produce a gallon of milk which he sells for 3s. 1½d... Concentrate inputs beyond £45 per cow per year..have no additional effect..upon milk yield.

1959 Oxf. Univ. Gaz. 16 Mar. 796/1 The farmer also uses up large quantities of ‘industrial inputs’ (equipment, motor fuel, fertilizers, &c.), representing goods and services which could, directly or indirectly, have been exported if the British farmer had not used them, or which, in some cases, have to be imported.

1972 VAT: Gen. Guide (H.M. Customs & Excise) 16 Those goods and services are called his inputs, and the tax on them is his input tax.

1972 Accountant 13 Apr. 471/1 Historically, Britain's indirect taxes had been collectible at a single point and from a restricted clientele; VAT, on the other hand, would be all pervasive. For any person receiving taxable ‘inputs’, zero-rating would be found preferable, ‘if at all possible’ to exemption.

1972 Accountant 28 Sept. 402/3 Companies with only internal transactions should ensure that they did not lose relief for VAT suffered (input tax).

1948 Math. Tables & Other Aids Computation 3 7 The ‘input’ for a computational problem (i.e., the information available before the start of the computation) consists of two kinds of elements: numbers, and ‘orders’.

1948 Math. Tables & Other Aids Computation 3 9 The tapes which contain the input for any problem are classified into three groups.

1949 D. R. Hartree Calculating Instruments & Machines (1950) vii. 80 Input and output for this machine are expressed in standard teletype code, with a coded symbol for the operation required.

1964 A. Lytel Fund. Data Processing viii. 165 Punched paper tape can be read and used as a computer input.

1967 D. Wilson in G. Wills & Yearsley Handbk. Managem. Technol. iii. 45 It is sometimes necessary to obtain a detailed listing of all the input to determine where the error has occurred.

1973 Time 13 Aug. 20/2 Business gave its own donation at the office, with the computer talk of ‘inputs’..and ‘print-outs’.

1954 Canad. Jrnl. Psychol. 8 70 The maintenance of normal, intelligent, adaptive behaviour probably requires a continually varied sensory input.

1959 Amer. Jrnl. Psychiatry 115 1110/1 These studies suggest that maintaining adequate sensory input during space missions will be less of a problem than providing adequate information input.

1972 Jrnl. Social Psychol. 86 220 Individuals who can tolerate diverse inputs from the environment may not be markedly affected by success or failure.

1961 H. A. Gleason Introd. Descr. Ling. (rev. ed.) xii. 173 It is normally stated in the form of rules which may be applied to one of the pair—an input—altering it to produce the other—an output.

1966 M. Pei Gloss. Ling. Terminol. Input, in transformational grammar, the term applied to a construction that is transformed into another..which is called the output (input: ‘he goes’; output: ‘he does go’, ‘he does not go’, etc.).

1969 W. A. Cook Introd. Tagmemic Analysis ii. 42 The transformational rule is simply a rule of change. This rule has an input string, a rule of change, and an output string. With kernel sentences as input, it is possible to set up a series of optional rules that will produce the output, the derived sentences.

1971 R. Fowler in Archivum Linguisticum 2 136 These rules..are typical of the local transformations which follow base constituent-structure rules on the present grammatical model. Their inputs and outputs are concatenated sets of syntactic..features, and their effect is to replace or add one feature in one set.