Remington Rand - by Bradford Morgan White
This is the third installment of a series. You may be interested in The ENIAC as well as The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
James Henry Rand Junior was born on the 18th of November in 1886 in North Tonawanda, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in 1908 from Harvard University. After graduating, he went to work with his father at Rand Ledger Company. He married Miriam Smith in 1910. Aside from business, he loved speedboats, raced them, and was successful in his hobby. He ran his father’s company for the years 1910 to 1914 while his father was suffering from an illness. When his father recovered, the two business men parted ways. They rather seriously disagreed on advertising, and they somewhat disagreed on product ideas. The Rand Ledger Company’s product was essentially a paper database system. It involved dividers, file tabs, and index cards along with instructions on how to develop your organizational system. The younger Rand had some rather innovative ideas around this system and following he and his father’s dispute, he created the Kardex Visible Record Control. In the product manual for Kardex VRC, we see the information problem of that time period rather well stated:
If control is to be recaptured, record equipment and procedure must be geared to the times again. There must be replacement of inefficiency and modernization of the obsolete. Then the cost of record keeping may return to more profitable proportions and its products may contribute more substantially to the solution of problems of management.
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