The IBM 407 Accounting Machine was an electric punched-card accounting machine designed to produce printed reports, totals, and summary information from punched-card records. It was produced by IBM from 1949 and was available to IBM customers until 1976 ¹. The machine was programmed through a control panel with movable wires, which allowed the machine to be easily rewired to do different operations dependent on the operator’s requirements.

The machine fed cards from a hopper, reading them and performing calculations and data processing tasks, on the fields of the punched cards. The results of processing, individual cards, groups of cards, or totals of entire card sets could be printed by an integrated line printer or punched onto additional punched cards (summary punching). The machine’s flexible programming allowed the operator to determine how data is listed, accumulated, and summarized, making it suitable for high-volume business accounting and reporting tasks ². An additional feature of the IBM 407 included address-printing, which allowed the machine to print addresses from the punched cards on strips of paper for use on envelopes or labels ³.