The 077 Collator performed many card-filing and -pulling operations. As a filing machine, the 077 simultaneously fed and compared two groups of punched cards: records already in file and those yet to be filed. It then merged the groups in numerical or alphabetical sequence. The 077 could pair current transactions with previous transactions, track debits with credits, sort master cards by name and address, select cards by a given number, and segregate them by date.
At the time, IBM heralded the 077 as one of the company’s most innovative and important inventions. According to the in-house publication Business Machines: “It signals the entrance of IBM into a field of operation which heretofore has been accepted as requiring manual assistance to the otherwise automatic machine procedure of the punched card system.”
Years after development, MacDonald explained the central role the 077 played in landing the SSA contract. “We couldn’t have done a decent job with Social Security unless we had the collator,” he said. “We needed it because Social Security punched cards from records sent from all over the country, and we had to bring them together. To try to sort them together would have been out of the question as there were millions and millions.” He concluded that without the collator “we would have been lost.”
The collator remained a staple of Social Security operations for two decades and made a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line, boosting total revenue 81 percent between 1935 and 1939, and cementing a relationship with the federal government that continues to this day.
According to author and historian James Cortada: “It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Social Security win to the evolution of IBM. That one piece of business, along with its effects on other agencies and businesses, wiped out the Great Depression for IBM. That transaction handed IBM a potential market of 20,000 other companies that would need to process Social Security data.”
In other words, Watson’s bet paid off in a very big way.