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(IMHO, it lost a bit in the translation to production dies.)įriden had a wonderfully-capable engineer named Robert Ragen, one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and a very pleasant, rather self-effacing fellow at that.
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It was a fascinating, exciting, and very memorable experience to see this calculator for the first time it was beautifully styled. The author, Nicholas Bodley, was one of the original eight technicians to be trained at the factory on this calculator. This article is a set of recollections about a very significant product in the history of calculators. that was a successful competitor to the EC-130. Monroe was the other of the "Mechanical Big Three" in nonprinting desktop calculators in the USA they seemed to be late in bringing out an electronic desktop machine however, they had a brilliantly-designed Speed was of no particular consequence an "all nines" multiplier caused no appreciable wait.Īround the same time Friden introduced the EC-130, Marchant brought out a nice, rather compact machine called the Cogito 240SR, that had a display like that of the Friden, but with peculiar half-size zeros that looked quite odd. This wasn't too bad if the operands were integers, but it did have decimal-point logic, and the decimal point sometimes appeared in a bizarre place when mixed operands were multiplied it wrapped around the end, and popped up in a logical, but peculiar place.
FRIDEN CALCULATOR EBAY DIRECTIONS FULL
The Anita did all four functions, but because each digit was costly, it couldn't display all digits of a full product from a multiplication. A single Dekatron tube was used in the Anita as a keyboard The other twenty were connected into two groups of ten, and a two-phase clock stepped the glow to the next "stable" cathode in two stages by temporarily "stealing" the glow from the "stable" cathodes.
FRIDEN CALCULATOR EBAY DIRECTIONS SERIES
Only one cathode would have a glow discharge a series resistor in the anode circuit kept the voltage below that required for other cathodes to conduct.
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Another variety of tube used in the Anita, called a Dekatron, had thirty cathodes. The internal logic used small neon-glow thyratron tubes. The Anita's display used shaped-cathode neon glow numerical-indicator tubes, known among the technical community in the USA as "Nixie" tubes this is a trademark, probably of Burroughs. It had 10-digit input, which would imply 90 keys for digit entry. The Anita had a beautifully-built full keyboard (each digit place had a vertical row of 9 keys, in a row extending toward and away from the operator. The world's first was the Anita C/VIII, made by Sumlock Comptometer Ltd. It's all offered in good faith!)Īround 1963, advances in electronic technology made it practical to build and market an electronic desktop calculator. The author has had a very strong interest in the topic, and was careful to check facts as he learned them. All of this comes from memory, and some material might be factually incorrect, but certainly not intentionally so. (With some notes about the world's first.) THE FRIDEN EC-130: THE WORLD'S SECOND ELECTRONIC DESKTOP CALCULATOR The Friden EC-130: The World's Second Electronic Desktop Calculator + Home