The disturbingly well-named "Cowculator" was created by Dr. C. D. Caskey, Director of Research for the Southern States Cooperative located in Richmond, VA. It took an existing series of formulas and built them into this special purpose analog computer. There were more than 20 variables, including dails for weight of cow, pounds of feed, nutrients in feed, hay quality, butterfat test, pasture or silage fed.

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

There is not a lot of information on this analog computer but based on the brochure we found and the mission of the Southern States Cooperative, they were not trying to sell very many. The brochure offers to let dairymen send in the data and the Southern States Coop would send them back the optimal feed for their cows! Coops were established by farmers to help farmers so this is no surprise.

No documentation came with this computer (an all too common experience with these much older computers). 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 Cowculater. The "Cowculator" is prominently pictured five times but the content of the brochure reads like instructions to gather data...field work, if you will...rather than computer prep work. In fact, at the end of the brochure, the dairyman is told to mail the results of his/her paperwork to the Southern States Coop 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" is by far the least interested in selling computers. Perhaps one of the readers has another nominee...let us know.

We have dated it to on or before July 18, 1961 due to a story in the August 10, 1961 issue of the Blackstone, (VA.), Courier-Record newspaper p. 3. The article was 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 (060361) along with three other pieces of evidence, suggests that "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, several months later. Both readings sit comfortably within the timeline established by the brochure printed in July 1961 (job number 61167, dated 7/61) and the Blackstone Courier-Record article of August 10, 1961, which places the program's formal rollout to Southern States field staff at a training session held July 18, 1961 in Richmond. 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 a tidy pattern across two units, but two data points is a thin foundation for certainty; it remains a working hypothesis rather than a documented fact, and a third surviving "Cowculator" with a serial number that either confirms or breaks the pattern would settle the question.

A Question

The Southern States Coop was located in Richmond, VA. How did the "Cowculator" come to be manufactured in the small town of Linthicum, Maryland, by an obscure outfit called DLC Company, working out of a Post Office Box (Box 113)? The lack of information on this company along with 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. Two circumstances may explain how a small Maryland company ended up building a specialized instrument for a Virginia-based cooperative. First, Maryland was one of the five states that made up Southern States' operating territory by 1961 (alongside Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, and Kentucky), so a Maryland-based contractor building equipment for the cooperative would not have been unusual. Second, Linthicum sits in one of the densest concentrations of electronics engineering talent on the East Coast, wedged between BWI Airport and Baltimore's defense-electronics corridor (Westinghouse's Baltimore operations among them), exactly the kind of environment that could produce a small, short-lived instrument shop capable of building a one-off analog computer for an outside client, with little interest in advertising itself beyond a want ad and a post office box.

Finally, although the "Cowculator" analog computer is long gone...the name lives on. 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. On the inside of the briefcase lid is a small tag that says "Manufacurer's Guarentee: Top Grain Cowhide". That's just wrong.