- The term "collate" was first used in the 14th century and comes from the Latin "collatus" meaning "to bring together." The first reference of collating to sorting documents appeared in 1628. By the early 1900s, massive amounts of people were located in the country's cities. Governments and business needed to find an efficient way to gather and analyze large amounts of data. Inventors rose to the task. In 1911, Herman Hollerith founded the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company which, thirteen years later, would become IBM. The U.S. Social Security Administration hired IBM to collate and organize the millions of punch cards they were receiving from employers around the country.
- H.J. McDonald and John Bryce worked at what was referred to as the "world's biggest bookkeeping job" and produced the first collator in 1937. It was called the IBM Type 77, or 077. They set up a production line to punch, sort, check and file over half a million cards per day.
- The creation of the collator allowed the government to implement many national programs that otherwise would've been nearly impossible. The collator was used to file new records (punch cards) into an existing set, remove duplicates, compare decks, check sequences, search for and extract desired records. Customizations of tasks were performed by re-engineering the control-panel wiring.
- In the 1960s, punch cards were the most economical way to store and file information. States such as Maine were transferring handwriting and other data onto punch cards. Businesses and educational institutions began to utilize punch cards as well. This created jobs for people that were called keypunch operators and verifiers. The main machines that facilitated their work were the collator and a sorter that arranged the documents or papers once collated.
- For offices without large collation jobs, the collator is a series of trays on the copy machine. There is usually a "collate" button that will place pages or documents either in alternating positions (horizontal then vertical) or into the separate trays of the collator. Here, collation is limited to the number of trays or amount the tray can hold. Small offices may have up to ten trays for documents, while industrial copiers could have over fifty. Many copiers also allow for stapling or binding.
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