Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting

ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting), was a pioneering computer development project run at SRI International under contract to Bank of America in order to automate banking bookkeeping. The project ran from 1950 to 1955.

ERMA was under the technical leadership of computer scientist Jerre Noe. After the project's successful conclusion, General Electric was contracted to build 32 ERMA machines. They were so successful in operation that Bank of America was propelled ahead of other banks in profitability, and became the world's largest bank by 1970.

In 1950, Bank of America was the largest bank in California, and led the world in the use of checks. This presented a serious problem due to the workload processing them. An experienced bookkeeper could post 245 accounts in an hour, about 2,000 in an 8-hour workday and approximately 10,000 per week. Bank of America's checking accounts were growing at a rate of 23,000 per month and banks were being forced to close their doors by 2:00 PM to finish daily postings.

S. Clark Beise was a senior vice president at BoA who was introduced to Thomas H. Morrin, SRI's Director of Engineering. They formed an alliance under which SRI would essentially act as BoA's R&D arm. In July 1950 they contracted SRI for an initial feasibility study for automating their bookkeeping and check handling.

SRI immediately found a problem. Because accounts were kept alphabetically, adding a new account required a reshuffling of the account listings. SRI instead suggested using account numbers, simply adding new ones to the end of the list. In addition these numbers would be pre-printed on checks, thereby dramatically reducing the time to match the checks with account information (known as "proofing"). Numbered accounts are now a feature of almost all banks.

With that problem out of the way, SRI returned a report in September 1950 that stated a computer-based system was certainly feasible, which they called ERM, the Electronic Recording Machine.

Bank of America then offered a second six-month contract in November to fully study the changes needed to banking procedures, and design the logical layout of production ERM machines. While this was underway, Bank of America went to a number of industrial companies to set up production of the machines, but none were interested. So SRI was given another contract in January 1952 to build a prototype machine.

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