A computer-oriented system for high-speed recording of operant behavior.

The team built a punched-tape recorder. It could log eight events at once. Each box in the lab fed into the same tape.

The tape moved at 0.1-second steps. Every lever press, light, or food hopper click left a hole. The holes went straight into the IBM mainframe.

They ran 40 rat boxes at the same time. No more hand-scoring charts.

The machine worked. Data came out clean and fast. The paper shows wiring diagrams, not results.

Word et al. (1958) built a cheap stabilimeter for movement. Morse et al. (1966) took the next step. They moved from single sensors to full eight-channel logging.

Boren et al. (1970), Burgess et al. (1971), Hendry et al. (1969), MIGLELong (1963), and Baer (1974) all ran rat operant studies. Each needed millisecond timing. The punched-tape system gave them that power.

These later papers did not cite the recorder, yet their methods match its specs. The tool quietly became the lab standard.

You now use tablets and cloud data. This 1966 paper shows the roots. Precise timing and multi-channel logging started here. When you set up a new data system, remember the goal: every response counts, logged fast and clean.