On: Old Calculator Web Museum

[jacquesm]

The fully mechanical ones are amazing machines, algorithms frozen in gears and levers.

[lostlogin → jacquesm]

The Curta is awesome. Styled as some sort of combination of hand grenade and camera lens. For “maths on the run.”

http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/curta2.html

Edit: check out its case and the tear down, it’s so great.

At the end is the ‘Iron Felix’, a Stalin era arithmometer, which is a bit less compact.

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate...

[flavio81 → jacquesm]

Yet there is also the Friden electronic, fully electronic but simply amazing for it's time (1965?):

It had CRT vector display of numbers ... For 1965 on a table-top model!

And memory was realized via a mechanic delay line, where the bits traveled around a loop, mechanically!

[jacquesm → flavio81]

I just spent an hour reading that same entry, absolutely amazing tech for the time and that they got that to work reliably enough for a mass market product is really amazing engineering.