Accounting machine
The punched-card era's report generator: a programmable tabulator that read decks of cards, summed fields and printed finished listings and invoices.
The tabulating or accounting machine (IBM 402 and 407, Bull, Powers-Samas) sat at the center of a punched-card installation. It read cards, accumulated totals in counters, and printed formatted reports — invoices, ledgers, payrolls — at up to around 150 lines per minute.
"Programming" it meant wiring a removable plugboard (control panel) to route card columns to the right print positions and counters. Together with the sorter, collator and keypunch it made up unit-record equipment. The stored-program computer eventually swallowed the whole job, though the machines lingered in accounting departments well into the 1960s.