Computer Station

an organization that performs calculations associated with the processing of statistical, accounting, and economic-planning data. The basic equipment of a computer station consists of punch-card handling units: keypunches, verifiers, sorting machines, and tabulating machines. As a rule it also has several key-actuated calculating machines. The major commercial stations, which work on an economically self-supporting basis, are known as computing factories. For small volumes of work, which cannot be efficiently handled by the high-capacity equipment of a computer station, machine-computing bureaus have been organized; there, only key-actuated calculating machines are used. Computer centers, equipped with digital computers, are larger-capacity organizations for data processing.

Data in a computer station take the form of various documents. The technical sequence of data processing in a computer station may conveniently be divided into three stages. The first stage is the receipt and initial processing of documents (such as multiplication, summation, or balancing, and the verification of each operation). The second stage is the preparation of the machine form of the data (such as punch cards) and verification of the encoding. The third stage includes the batching of the punch cards and its verification, the processing of the data (compilation of summary reports), and the alignment of the tables obtained and their output form (appearance). All the equipment of a computer station is usually housed in a single building. Sometimes, in order to increase the efficiency of the data processing, the devices for the primary processing of the documents (such as key-actuated calculators, keypunches, and verifiers) are set up directly at the plants served (in auxiliary computer stations), and the high-speed equipment used to perform the operations of the third stage is centralized.