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The whole activity of indexing is based on associating things and their characteristics. The two main ways of doing this are the listing of characteristics against each thing, and the listing of things against each characteristic. Lists of this type can be made on many different sorts of data vehicle, from magnetic drums to shirt cuffs. This article is concerned with cards, plain and punched.

Imagine a company that is expanding very rapidly in a labour intensive industry. It has a turnover of around £6m a year, employs something like 5 000 staff, and is run with the proverbial mixture of hunch and flair. It has a somewhat haphazard organisation structure, is finding great difficulty in attracting a sound management team, and usually leaves it to the managing director's whim to decide when a new post is needed. This is basically what Bateman looked like four or five years ago. We were a successful firm operating in the industrial catering field, providing meals for firms and businesses throughout the country. At the beginning of the 60's we had taken the decision to concentrate on the specialised, quality end of the market. This had paid dividends in terms of business, but it was causing us severe management growth pains. There was difficulty in knitting in the traditional business with the quality contracts we were after, and the whole of the organisation appeared to be overstretched by the expansion.