New ways of multiplying

The report presented was written by John McPherson in late 1935 and submitted to IBM Think magazine for publication. However, it was never published and recently resurfaced on John´s desk. The report outlines the development of methods for doing mass multiplication using a tabulating machine that was routinely used for simpler calculations in many companies. The tabulator was the mainstay of the IBM punched-card business and as such was the natural candidate for being expanded by the introduction of the operation of multiplication. While this report does not propose to modify the circuitry of the tabulator to perform multiplication, it does provide the operator with a means of accomplishing such a task using the machine´s built-in capabilities