Jonkers Business Machines

Jonkers Business Machines (1960-1969) was a US company that developed the Termatrex index machine.

Jonkers Business Machines was a company founded by Frederick Jonker, a Dutch American engineer to develop and market Termatrex equipment.

Jonkers began to develop the Termatrix system around 1950 and formed a patent holding corporation on 1953, which became an operational company in 1960.

Termatrex was an optical coincidence index system, also known as a feature card system. Instead of a record for each document with index terms attached, a record was created for each attribute (index term for topic, creator, etc., with the ID for each document assigned that attribute. A large cards, one for each attribute, had a fine grid with 10,000 positions, one for each document ID. To index a document the cards for its attributes were superimposed and a hole carefully in at the at the unique position for that document's ID.

To search for all documents with any particular attribute the card for that attribute is placed on a lighted surface and little spots of light, only where holes have been punched, reveal the ID numbers of all such documents.

Coordinate searches -- for documents with a two or more particular attributes -- were findable by superimposing the cards for the two or more attributes on the lighted surface. Spots of lights would appear only for documents having those attributes, regardless of whatever other attributes those documents may have had.

The basic equipment, other than the cards, which could be stored in a rack [1], were a punch (drill) [2] and a reader (viewer). [3]

Adding an removing cards in varying order allowed heuristic search strategies. Various elaborations and ancillary equipment were developed to ease large scale operation, including a counter that reported the number of light spots generated by each search.

The Minimatrex, introduced in 1963, substituted microfilm frames, half an inch by half an inch, each corresponding to a 10,000 position card. Each frame was on a separate strip of film. Frames were phtpgraphs of existing cards or could be computer generated, Ten frames could be superimposed to scale up to handling 100,000 documents. Great precision was required to make the microfilm frames, but, once made, copies of the filmstrips and readers could be duplicated and distributed at low cost.

A pilot "Project Law Search", using Minimatrex equipment, was supported by the Council on Library Resources.

Jonker Business Machines went bankrupt in 1969. REMAC International Corporation took over distribution and maintenance.

Gerald Sophar was an officer in the company. Other individuals involved included Mortimer Taube.

Further reading

• Frederick Jonker, “The New ‘Termatrex’ Line of I.R. Systems—The ‘Minimatrex’ Line of I. R. Systems,” American Documentation 14, no 4 (1963): 276-282. Describes the complete line of Termatrex equipment, the new line of Minimatrex equipment, and outlines future plans.
• Termatrex card punch Smithsonian. [4]
• 'Termatrex card reader Smithsonian. [5]
• Sophar, Gerald J. "'Termatrex' as a tool for storing and searching indexes." Modern Uses of Logic in Law 5, no 2 (Jume 1964): 1-12. Case study: Use of Termatrex optical discovery system for law searching.
• Kaplan, Judith. “Shining a Light on Archaeological Data Processing: The Termatrex Machine,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 42 (2018). [6]