I used to work for a wine and Spirit merchant in London, We had a series 200 for keeping sales ledgers on. This was originally a £sd Machine that was decimalised when England changed currency in the 70's. The machine had a serial number that showed it was imported from Detroit, It was a great machine it clanked along and did a great job considering it was nearly 25 years old. We also had an F 1400 £sd machine used for invoicing with crossfooter and Multiplication. It was connected to a Powers Samas 80 column Punch card machine, the cards were then processed by a bureau to list sales reorders and agents commission. It was deemed to costly to have decimalised and came to the end of the road.

"We just bought an old building. Inside, we found a complete Burroughs Series 100 (not 200) machine. It is nearly identical to the Series 200 Sensimatic. When was this made?Thanks."

"I use to fix these when i worked for Burroughs Corp. Wish I lived closer, I would try to restore it for free. I live in the Wheeling, WV area and have been trying to find one to restore. These were a mechanical marvel."

The picture of the Burroughs Sensimatic show the machine without a moving carriage. The true Sensimatic had a wide moving carriage and was a bookkeeping machine for posting charges and credits to customer accounts on Ledger cards. The name Sensimatic comes from the fact that the underside of the moving carriage had tab stops to align with ledger card columns with each tab stop including a programmable metal strip that the machine sensed at each tab stop to control carriage move and other machine functions. The Sensimatice was so successful that electronics was added in the seventies that allowed it store information electronically and transmit information to other locations such as from an bank teller to a central data center. This was one of the primary passbook teller systems in the seventies and early eighties. I worked for Burroughs Corporation for 10 years and serviced these machines in banks and businesses in Connecticut.

"This is a Burroughs F200 Sensimatic mechanical Accounting machine from the late 50s or early 60s. I am a former Burroughs Field Engineer and worked on many of these machines. I was probably one of the last engineers to go through factory training in Detroit Michigan. The Sensimatic was manufactured in a number of different models depending upon the totals and the carriage width. The F200 model had 5 totals and was primarily used in banking applications. In those days, banks posted account transactions manually to paper ledger cards. The carriage on the machine in the picture has been unattached from the main body of the machine. It would have been held on by 4 screws. The Sensimatic was a mechanical wonder in it's day and very successful. It was programed by different length pins that were held in a panel in the rear of the machine. The main competition for the Sensimatic was from National Cash Register (NCR). NCR and Burroughs competed head to head for many years. They were both wonderful companies to work for in those days. Pieces of these proud US companies exist today, but only as a shadow of their former greatness. For more information, please feel free to email me."

"Just came across your Burroughs Sensimatic F200. Looks like you are missing the Carriage and programmable control panel. If it is the F200 on which I worked in the 60's it will have one accumulator (crossfooter) which could handle addition and subtraction including negative figures. It also would have had four registers into which amounts could be added or subtracted, these however could hold a negative number only as a compliment which had to be maniputed to convert back to the correct figire by adding twice and subracting once into the crossfooter. Happy days."