Old calculators

[mmcirvin]

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.)

Comments

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

We just added a Friden STW-10 (electromechnical) to the collection at work; it was much more gunmetal green than the blue example on that page. Although the cord was too frayed to plug it in for the electrically assisted functions, I did get to play around with the keys and verify that the clear and carriage return functions worked.

Boggling artifact of a lost civilization

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Wow.

http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/fridenstw.html

I'm particularly impressed by the side sans-case views.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Of course, the great exception to the general ugliness on that page is the Curta, which is a thing of pure joy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The thing I noticed the last time I spent some hours reading about old calculators was that in the pre-integrated-circuit era, there seemed to be a sharp class- and sex-based division between calculators made to be used by the girls in the computing pool, and calculators made to be used by high-status scientists and engineers. The machines in the first category had unpleasant case designs and patronizing training materials constantly hectoring the user toward greater speed and accuracy (reminding me of the touch-typing textbooks I saw in the 1980s); often they'd have features designed not to make the calculator easier to use, but to make it possible for a properly drilled operator to go faster. The machines in the second category were sold as precision instruments with friendly, chatty manuals explaining theory of operation.

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).

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

Post, too. Somewhere on my bookshelf at work I have an incredibly patronizing manual for the DECmate (even your secretary can use it!), which I meant to scan some pieces of but never got around to.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I think this is, or is very much like, the Heathkit calculator my college roommate had. One quirk was that the display would sometimes not come on, or at least would not come on right away, unless you held it under a bright light.

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."

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

And we had one of these in my high school. Aside from my Digi-Comp I it was the first machine I ever programmed on. The program I remember most fondly was one that made it play music -- well, rhythms, anyway, on the builtin printer. Whoever was paying for the printer paper must have adored me for that.

[pantom.livejournal.com]

First computer I ever programmed was a Wang 2200-B, one step above a programmable calculator. It took cassette as its data and programming input. The big thing that separated the B from the A, the previous model, was that you could recall a line of code and edit it with the special function keys along the top of the keyboard.
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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

First one I attempted to program was a Commodore PET 2001. The first one I successfully programmed was a Honeywell mainframe at my dad's office.