Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting

Last updated
The ERMA logo ERMA logo.jpg
The ERMA logo

ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting) was a computer technology that automated bank bookkeeping and check processing. Developed at the nonprofit research institution SRI International under contract from Bank of America, the project began in 1950 and was publicly revealed in September 1955. [1] [2]

Contents

Payments experts contend that ERMA "established the foundation for computerized banking, magnetic ink character recognition (MICR), and credit-card processing". [3] General Electric (GE) won the production contract, deciding to transistorize the design in the process. Calling the machine the GE-100, a total of 32 ERMA machines were built. GE would use this experience to develop several mainframe computer lines before selling the division to Honeywell in 1970.

History

Background

The ERMA team from SRI International ERMA Team.jpg
The ERMA team from SRI International

In 1950, Bank of America (BoA) was the largest bank in California, [1] and led the world in the use of cheques. This presented a serious problem due to the workload processing time. An experienced bookkeeper could post 245 accounts in an hour, about 2,000 in an eight-hour workday and approximately 10,000 per week. Bank of America's checking accounts were growing at a rate of 23,000 per month and banks were being forced to close their doors by 2 p.m. to finish daily postings.

S. Clark Beise was a senior vice president at BoA who was introduced to Thomas H. Morrin, SRI's Director of Engineering. They formed an alliance under which SRI would essentially act as BoA's research and development arm. In July 1950 they contracted SRI for an initial feasibility study for automating their bookkeeping and check handling. [4] [5] [6] ERMA was under the technical leadership of computer scientist Jerre Noe. [7]

First study

An early check, demonstrating the features developed by SRI: account numbers and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. Check with MICR.jpg
An early check, demonstrating the features developed by SRI: account numbers and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.

SRI immediately found a problem. Because accounts were kept alphabetically, adding a new account required a reshuffling of the account listings. SRI instead suggested using account numbers, simply adding new ones to the end of the list. In addition these numbers would be pre-printed on checks, thereby dramatically reducing the time to match the checks with account information (known as "proofing"). Numbered accounts are now a feature of almost all banks.

With that problem out of the way, SRI returned a report in September 1950 that stated a computer-based system was certainly feasible, which they called the Electronic Recording Machine (ERM).

Second study

The wiring in an ERMA machine ERMA wiring.jpg
The wiring in an ERMA machine

Bank of America then offered a second six-month contract in November to fully study the changes needed to banking procedures, and design the logical layout of production ERM machines. While this was underway, Bank of America went to a number of industrial companies to set up production of the machines, but none were interested. So SRI was given another contract in January 1952 to build a prototype machine.

One of the biggest problems found in the second phase was how to input the check information, especially the account numbers, with any sort of speed. Beise demanded a system that would not require the information to be changed from one medium to another, from check to punched card for instance, while simultaneously lowering error rates.

SRI investigated several solutions to the problem, including the first OCR system from a company in Arlington, Virginia. However, they found that it was all too easy for banks, and customers, to write over the account numbers and spoil the system. They also experimented with barcode information, and while this worked well even when printed over, if there was enough "damage" to the code a human operator could not read them in order to input them manually.

Instead, they decided to combine the two technologies, and used MICR-printed account numbers which could be read by a magnetic reader similar to those in a cassette tape recorder. The resulting reader was a mechanical tour-de-force, combining five MICR readers with a large rotating drum that forced checks dumped in the top to come out the bottom single-file. The system was eventually able to read ten checks a second, with errors on the order of 1 per 100,000 checks.

Final prototype

The final ERM computer contained more than a million feet (304,800 metres) of wiring, 8,000 vacuum tubes, 34,000 diodes, 5 input consoles with MICR readers, 2 magnetic memory drums, the check sorter, a high-speed printer, a power control panel, a maintenance board, 24 racks holding 1,500 electrical packages and 500 relay packages, and 12 magnetic tape drives for 2,400-foot (731-metre) tape reels.

ERM weighed about 25 tons (22.7 tonnes), used more than 80 kW of power and required cooling by an air conditioning system. By 1955, the system was still in development, but BoA was anxious to announce the project. At the time, computers (still known as "electronic brains") were all the rage; if BoA could announce that they were using them, it would convey a sense of futuristic infallibility. In September 1955, BoA froze the design.

By this point, no fewer than 24 companies had expressed interest in building the production machines, and General Electric won the competition. [8] Among GE's team members was AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum. The company took the basic design, but decided it was time to move the tube-based system to a transistor-based one using core memory. [9] This won SRI yet another contract, this time by GE, to study the commercial computer market and suggest how ERM machines could be sold into other markets. After the construction run, they also contracted them to dispose of the original machine.

Legacy

The first production ERMA system, known as the GE-100, was installed in 1959. Over the next two years 32 systems were installed and by 1966 twelve regional ERMA centers served all but 21 of Bank of America's 900 branches. [10] The centers handled more than 750 million checks a year, about the number they had predicted to occur by 1970. The automation was so effective that it allowed Bank of America to be the first bank to offer credit cards attached to a user's bank account. They were so successful in operation that Bank of America was propelled ahead of other banks in profitability, and became the world's largest bank by 1970.

ERMA machines were replaced with newer equipment in the early 1970s. There is a special room commemorating ERMA machines inside the Bank of America facilities in Concord, California.[ citation needed ]

Payments experts contend that ERMA "established the foundation for computerized banking, magnetic ink character recognition (MICR), and credit-card processing". [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burroughs Corporation</span> American computer company

The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company by William Seward Burroughs. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many of the major developments in computing. At its start, it produced mechanical adding machines, and later moved into programmable ledgers and then computers. It was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, also producing related equipment including typewriters and printers.

Electronic cash was, until 2007, the debit card system of the German Banking Industry Committee, the association that represents the top German financial interest groups. Usually paired with a transaction account or current account, cards with an Electronic Cash logo were only handed out by proper credit institutions. An electronic card payment was generally made by the card owner entering their PIN at a so-called EFT-POS-terminal (Electronic-Funds-Transfer-Terminal). The name "EC" originally comes from the unified European checking system Eurocheque. Comparable debit card systems are Maestro and Visa Electron. Banks and credit institutions who issued these cards often paired EC debit cards with Maestro functionality. These combined cards, recognizable by an additional Maestro logo, were referred to as "EC/Maestro cards".

Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is at the bottom of cheques and other vouchers and typically includes the document-type indicator, bank code, bank account number, cheque number, cheque amount, and a control indicator. The format for the bank code and bank account number is country-specific.

Cheque clearing or bank clearance is the process of moving cash from the bank on which a cheque is drawn to the bank in which it was deposited, usually accompanied by the movement of the cheque to the paying bank, either in the traditional physical paper form or digitally under a cheque truncation system. This process is called the clearing cycle and normally results in a credit to the account at the bank of deposit, and an equivalent debit to the account at the bank on which it was drawn, with a corresponding adjustment of accounts of the banks themselves. If there are not enough funds in the account when the cheque arrived at the issuing bank, the cheque would be returned as a dishonoured cheque marked as non-sufficient funds.

Bank fraud is the use of potentially illegal means to obtain money, assets, or other property owned or held by a financial institution, or to obtain money from depositors by fraudulently posing as a bank or other financial institution. In many instances, bank fraud is a criminal offence.

In the United States, an ABA routing transit number is a nine-digit code printed on the bottom of checks to identify the financial institution on which it was drawn. The American Bankers Association (ABA) developed the system in 1910 to facilitate the sorting, bundling, and delivering of paper checks to the drawer's bank for debit to the drawer's account.

The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act is a United States federal law, Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law  108–100 (text)(PDF), that was enacted on October 28, 2003 by the 108th U.S. Congress. The Check 21 Act took effect one year later on October 28, 2004. The law allows the recipient of a paper check to create a digital version of the original, a process known as check truncation, into an electronic format called a "substitute check", thereby eliminating the need for further handling of the physical document. In essence, the recipient bank no longer returns the paper check, but effectively e-mails an image of both sides of the check to the bank it is drawn upon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheque</span> Method of payment

A cheque or check is a document that orders a bank to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account where the money is held. The drawer writes various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay the amount of money stated to the payee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM document processors</span> Check processing peripheral for IBM mainframes

IBM manufactured and sold document processing equipment such as proof machines, inscribers and document reader/sorters for financial institutions from 1934 to 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic funds transfer</span> Electronic transfer of money from one bank account to another

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) is the electronic transfer of money from one bank account to another, either within a single financial institution or across multiple institutions, via computer-based systems, without the direct intervention of bank staff.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Payment card</span> Card issued by a financial institution that can be used to make a payment

Payment cards are part of a payment system issued by financial institutions, such as a bank, to a customer that enables its owner to access the funds in the customer's designated bank accounts, or through a credit account and make payments by electronic transfer with a payment terminal and access automated teller machines (ATMs). Such cards are known by a variety of names, including bank cards, ATM cards, client cards, key cards or cash cards.

Jerre Noe was an American computer scientist. In the 1950s, he led the technical team for the ERMA project, the Bank of America's first venture into computerized banking. In 1968 he became the first chair of the University of Washington's Computer Science Group, which later evolved into the Computer Science and Engineering Department.

A card reader is a data input device that reads data from a card-shaped storage medium and provides the data to a computer. Card readers can acquire data from a card via a number of methods, including: optical scanning of printed text or barcodes or holes on punched cards, electrical signals from connections made or interrupted by a card's punched holes or embedded circuitry, or electronic devices that can read plastic cards embedded with either a magnetic strip, computer chip, RFID chip, or another storage medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCR 315</span>

The NCR 315 Data Processing System, released in January 1962 by NCR, is a second-generation computer. All printed circuit boards use resistor–transistor logic (RTL) to create the various logic elements. It uses 12-bit slab memory structure using magnetic-core memory. The instructions can use a memory slab as either two 6-bit alphanumeric characters or as three 4-bit BCD digits. Basic memory is 5000 "slabs" of handmade core memory, which is expandable to a maximum of 40,000 slabs in four refrigerator-size cabinets. The main processor includes three cabinets and a console section that houses the power supply, keyboard, output writer, and a panel with lights that indicate the current status of the program counter, registers, arithmetic accumulator, and system errors. Input/Output is by direct parallel connections to each type of peripheral through a two-cable bundle with 1-inch-thick cables. Some devices like magnetic tape and the CRAM are daisy-chained to allow multiple drives to be connected.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hewitt Crane</span>

Hewitt D. Crane (1927–2008) was an American engineer best known for his pioneering work at SRI International on ERMA, for Bank of America, magnetic digital logic, neuristor logic, the development of an eye-movement tracking device, and a pen-input device for computers.

In banking, a lockbox is a service offered to organizations by commercial banks to simplify collection and processing of accounts receivable by having those organizations' customers' payments mailed directly to a location accessible by the bank.

Cleaning cards are disposable products designed to clean the interior contact points of a device that facilitates an electronic information transaction. In order for the cleaning card to work properly in the device, the card resembles or mimics the material of the transaction media – such as a credit card, check, or currency. As the cleaning card is inserted and passed through the device, it will clean components that would normally come in contact with the transaction media such as readers, lenses, read/write chip and pins, belts, rollers, and paths. Cleaning card products are widely accepted and endorsed by device manufacturers and industry professionals. Many have developed their own cleaning cards to better clean their particular devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheque truncation</span> Process of scanning cheques to produce their electronic copies

Cheque truncation is a cheque clearance system that involves the digitization of a physical paper cheque into a substitute electronic form for transmission to the paying bank. The process of cheque clearance, involving data matching and verification, is done using digital images instead of paper copies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital card</span> Virtual online representation of a plastic card

The term digital card can refer to a physical item, such as a memory card on a camera, or, increasingly since 2017, to the digital content hosted as a virtual card or cloud card, as a digital virtual representation of a physical card. They share a common purpose: Identity Management, Credit card, Debit card or driver license. A non-physical digital card, unlike a Magnetic stripe card can emulate (imitate) any kind of card.

Homer Ray Oldfield Jr., also known as Barney Oldfield, was an American computer professional best known for his work for General Electric in the 1940s and 50s.

References

  1. 1 2 "Our Heritage: Bank of America revolutionizes banking industry". Bank of America. Retrieved 19 January 2020.
  2. "Timeline of Innovations: Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting". SRI International. Archived from the original on 2013-05-11. Retrieved 2012-07-15.
  3. 1 2 Hannah H. Kim (November 2019). "ERMA's whiz kids". Increment (11).
  4. Nielson, p. 2-2
  5. Amy Weaver Fisher; James L. McKenney (1993). "The Development of the ERMA Banking System: Lessons from History". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . IEEE. 15 (1): 44–57. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.175.6002 . doi:10.1109/85.194091. S2CID   31809513.
  6. James L. McKenney; Duncan C. Copeland; Richard O. Mason (1995-01-01). Waves of Change: Business Evolution Through Information Technology. Harvard Business Press. p. 44. ISBN   978-0-87584-564-7.
  7. Nielson, Donald (2006). A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century. Menlo Park, California: SRI International. pp. 2–8. ISBN   978-0-9745208-1-0.
  8. "ERMA Proposal ICB-1100101". Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation. Retrieved 2012-07-15.
  9. Thelen, Ed. "ERMA: Electronic Recording Method of Accounting". Facts and stories about Antique (lonesome) Computers. Retrieved 2012-07-15.
  10. "Bank of America history: Technology & innovations", Bank of America