Cowculator Analog Computer

YEAR: June 12, 1961
ITEM: Analog Computer
COMPANY: DLC Company
COUNTRY: USA
IN OUR COLLECTION: Yes
DOCS AVAILABLE:  Marketing Material   📣

The disturbingly well-named "Cowculator" was created by Dr. C. D. Caskey, Director of Research for the Southern States Cooperative headquartered in Richmond, VA.¹ Dr. Caskey's idea was to take an existing series of well-established formulas for cattle nutrition and hard-wire them into this special purpose analogue computer. The formulas represented both tried-and-true practices in dairy farming and Dr. Caskey's own research into animal nutrition. The computer was able to evaluate more than 20 variables for each individual cow, including setting dials for cow weight, pounds of feed, nutrients in feed, hay quality, butterfat tests, and whether the cow was pasture or silage fed.

The computer in our collection, serial #060361, is housed in a standard briefcase and contains a normal 120v plug along with an alternate power connection that is likely a vehicle battery/cigarette-lighter style DC adapter.

No documentation came with this computer (an all-too-common experience with these much older computers). The computer was primarily promoted by the Southern States Cooperative (SSC), an owner-operated organization composed of farmers in five states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia)². It does not seem to have been intended to be sold to individual dairy farmers. Instead, the computer would be purchased by local offices of the SSC and its use would be provided as a service to the member farmers. We located a brochure about the Cowculator but either I am badly misreading it, or the content of the brochure seems completely focused on the paperwork that needs to be done for each cow in advance of using the Cowculator. Pictures of the Cowculator are prominently displayed (five pictures) but the text of the brochure reads less like marketing material and more like instructions to gather data about your cows...field work, if you will...rather than computer prep work. In fact, at the end of the brochure, (next to a picture of a farmer putting an envelope into a mailbox) the dairyman is told to mail the results of his/her paperwork to the SSC where THE COOP STAFF will enter the data into the Cowculator and return the results:

Even more telling, Al Kossow of the Computer History Museum located a small advertisement which actually described the "Cowculator" as a "service" not a product. The ad is thought to be from the early 1960s and reads:

Of all the computers I have seen, the Cowculator staff is by far the least interested in selling computers. Perhaps one of the readers has another nominee...let us know. The Cowculator does seem to have spread beyond the original five states of SSC.

We have dated it to June 12, 1961 due to a story in the June 28, 1961 Lexington Gazette, Volume 160, Number 26 entitled Device Figures Correct Feeding For Dairymen that points out "The first public showing of the computor³ took place June 12 at a meeting of the American Dairy Science Association at Madison, Wis." Almost two months later, the August 10, 1961 issue of the Blackstone, (VA.), Courier-Record newspaper p. 3, published an article headlined "Inge Returns From Training With Cowculator"...just one column squeezed between a wedding announcement and a funeral notice at the top of the page. The article read as follows:

A bit of Speculation

The serial number on this unit (SN-060361) suggests that the Cowculator serial numbers may have doubled as manufacture dates (MM-DD-YY). Read that way, our unit was built on June 3, 1961. The Computer History Museum's Cowculator carries serial number 113061, which would place its construction on November 30, 1961. Both readings sit comfortably within the timeline established by

• the trademark application on May 2, 1961,
• the brochure printed in July 1961 (job number 61167, dated 7/61)
• and an article in the July 8, 1961 Altoona Mirror in Altoona, PA p.14, about the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau celebrating their "new electronic brain".
• the program's formal rollout to Southern States field staff at a training session held July 18, 1961, in Richmond,
• the Blackstone Courier-Record article of August 10, 1961, about this new computer.
• a small ad in the Lisbon Landmark Farm Bureau Cooperative in Ohio reported to be from 1962.
• and an article in March 1963 showing the Cowculator being used just over the border in Huron County, Canada.

A June 1961 build date for our unit would put it among the earliest Cowculators made, manufactured in the weeks just before that first training class...while the CHM unit, built that November, would have come along after the program was already up and running in the field. It's an enticing pattern across two units, but two data points are a thin foundation for certainty; a third surviving Cowculator with a serial number might either confirm or break the pattern and would likely settle the question.

A Question

The Southern States Coop was located in Richmond, VA but the Cowculator was made in a small town about 150 miles from the Southern States Coop location. How did the Cowculator come to be manufactured in the small town of Linthicum, Maryland, by an obscure outfit called DLC Company...a company whose mailing address was a Post Office Box (Box 113)? The lack of a street address suggests a small operation, possibly a one- or two-person contract shop, rather than an established instrument manufacturer. Almost nothing about DLC Company survives in the public record.

We considered several possible explanations to explain how a small Maryland company ended up building a specialized instrument for a Virginia-based cooperative. Maryland was one of the five states that made up Southern States Coop's operating territory in 1961, so a Maryland-based contractor building equipment for the cooperative would not have been unusual. More importantly, a search for Caskey & Linthicum resulted in Dr. C. D. Caskey who lived in Linthicum, MD!

Dr. Caskey was an agricultural research scientist who specialized in animal nutrition. After earning his doctorate at Cornell University, he became vice president and director of research for Cooperative Mills, Inc., which had offices in Linthicum, Maryland. The company was a major animal feed manufacturing arm associated with the Southern States Cooperative. Although Dr. Caskey did not patent his analogue computer, he did trademark the name "Cowculator" on May 2, 1961. In his application (https://trademarks.justia.com/721/19/cowculator-72119112.html) he stated that the first time the term was used anywhere was on April 10, 1961.

I found an ad (see pics) entitled New "Hands" in the Milkhouse which showed a picture of Dr. Caskey with what I assume was prototype for his analogue computer. The two surviving Cowculators (here and at the CHM) were meant to be portable, the prototype was clearly meant to sit on a desk. The article is undated but thought to be from early 1961 and it specifically links Cooperative Mills, Dr. Caskey, the Cowculator, and Linthicum, MD. The article ends by saying "If you would like to know more about his "gizmo," we suggest you write to Dr. C. D. Caskey, Linthicum, Md." No mention of a company or address to contact number.

The name D.L.C. Company had suggested initials all along--someone close to Dr. Caskey or someone he admired. The final article I found, from the June 28th Lexington Gazette, provided the answer. The company was almost certainly named after Dr. Caskey's son, David. That article also answered a question I hadn't thought to ask: why would an agricultural research scientist take on the design of an electronic analogue computer in the first place?

All indicators now point to a father-and-son operation: Dr. Caskey, the electronics hobbyist with a lifelong interest in the field, and David, the MIT electrical engineering student, building the early Cowculators together in their Linthicum home.

Remember our speculation that the serial numbers actually doubled as the manufacturing dates? This article raises the very real possibility that David and his Dad worked on the Cowculator in our collection...David would have been home from MIT for the summer in June 1961, exactly when our own unit, serial 060361, would have come off their workbench.

(All we know about the location of the Cowculator in our collection is that it was found at a flea market in Maryland...just 7 miles from Linthicum.)

Finally, although the Cowculator analogue computer is long gone...the name lives on. (Dr. Caskey's trademark expired in 1987.) As of August 2026, Oklahoma State University is offering a program called the "Cowculator v2.0" which offers "Beef Cow Nutrition Evaluation Software"!

If you have made it here...and I cannot help but wonder what kind of computer aficionado read all the way down here...then you deserve some sort of award. Earlier I noted that the computer was disturbingly named. Why? On the inside of the nice leather briefcase lid is a small tag that says, "Manufacturer's Guarantee: Top Grain Cowhide". That's just wrong.

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¹ It seems that Dr. Caskey held both the title of VP/Director of Research for Cooperative Mills specifically (handling feed formulation, testing, and manufacturing-side R&D) while also functioning as Southern States' overall Director of Research and chairing cross-cooperative technical committees, as the 1958 piece shows.

²A number of souces, including Wikipedia.com and Encyclopedia.com, claim that SSC had five member states. An article from November 27, Eastern Shore News on 1958, indicates that there were six. See pictures. One possible explanation is the 1958 article focuses on Cooperative Mills, which was SSC?s feed manufacturing subsidiary. So, while the SSC itself did not operate in Tennessee, its manufacturing arm (Cooperative Mills) partnered with outside organizations and may have been active in Tennessee.

³Two different newspaper articles referred to the Cowculator "computor". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "computor" was a recognized alternative spelling during the early days of computing, peaking in usage around the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s, it had almost completely disappeared.