Before the advent of computers, special-purpose hardware was used to solve calculating problems even in fields that are rarely mentioned in studies on history.

For instance, the main problem for the pari-mutuel system of gambling on horse races was posed by keeping, from minute to minute, a continuous and accurate record of the totals of bets placed on each horse, and the grand total of all bets. In the half hour or hour before a race, tens of thousands of bets would often be placed in the betting tents and booths. Manual and initial mechanical devices provided only temporary solutions to the problem.

The pari-mutuel system was developed in the 1860s by Joseph Oller, a Catalan entrepreneur who lived in Paris. Attempts at using simple machines in the system were already made in the 1880s, while the first truly automatic machine, the Totalisator was set to work a hundred years ago, in 1913 in Auckland, New Zealand. It was developed by Sir George Julius, born in Britain, who also set up a company called Automatic Totalisator Ltd.

The machine grew immensely popular in the 1920s, and world-fame was brought by its giant version installed at the Longchamp racecourse in Paris in 1927. In the years to come, further developments were made, new generations were introduced, new functions were added, for instance, to calculate dividends and make predictions etc. Totalisators were phased out in 1973, when the obsolete machines were replaced by real computers

Bob Doran, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Auckland will talk about these early machines on 16 June at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (www.computerhistory.org).