Old calculators
Oct. 22nd, 2006 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Lest you think I only admire those old machines for their beauty, here's a link again to the Old Calculator Museum, which I mentioned some time ago. Most of these old calculators are astonishingly ugly devices, made at a low point in the history of industrial design, but I love them anyway, probably because they remind me of my childhood.
(The ahead-of-its-time Friden EC-130 had a sort of buttoned-down, mid-C20-technocratic beauty to it, though.)
(The ahead-of-its-time Friden EC-130 had a sort of buttoned-down, mid-C20-technocratic beauty to it, though.)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-22 10:03 pm (UTC)Boggling artifact of a lost civilization
Date: 2006-10-22 10:49 pm (UTC)http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/fridenstw.html
I'm particularly impressed by the side sans-case views.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-22 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-22 11:57 pm (UTC)Of course, what happened later on was that the computing pool disappeared entirely, replaced by programmable computers, and low-end calculators today tend to be machines for occasional use by people who don't need to calculate very often (to the extent that calculators as standalone devices are used at all--many people just use the ones built into computers or, increasingly, telephones).
no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 02:08 pm (UTC)And if I recall correctly, he bought it circa 1973 for about $300.
A couple years later he was still using it while we were using our $125 HP-21s and the like, and someone asked him if he regretted paying $300 for a four-function, AC powered calculator. "Regret," he replied, "isn't the word."
no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 08:43 pm (UTC)The first disk drives were a big deal, of course.
I believe, although I don't remember specifically anymore, that there was a Wang calculator programmable in BASIC as well. I didn't see any in your link, but I'm pretty sure there was one out there.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-24 12:53 am (UTC)