HP’s definitely had better mechanical quality. At the time, the big techie “war” was HP vs TI, RPN vs Algebraic.
![friden calculator friden calculator](https://i.etsystatic.com/19209183/r/il/574afd/2138552037/il_570xN.2138552037_icep.jpg)
![friden calculator friden calculator](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/182434053395_/Vintage-Friden-Calculator-Model-ST-10.jpg)
Unfortunately, it was stolen, but I was able to move on to a HP-41C. My first calculator was the HP34C - I learned to program on it. He had a HP45 from work, and we had fun with the “easter egg” timer mode. Two appear to be banknotes, but I didn’t recognize them or any of the other faces.īTW, I remember my dad buying a VFD calculator back in the 1970’s – can’t remember the brand (Rockwell maybe, or some Japanese brand). Wow, from transistors on the Friedan to the HP35 in less than 10 years- technology changed fast, even then.įinally, did you notice the pictures hanging on Cliff’s wall? I paused it at 8:05 and zoomed in. It couldn’t detect a divide by zero on would go into an infinite loop with the numbers changing wildly on the LED display. Instead it had an exposed PCB with 16 pads and a stylus attached to a wire and a “keystroke” consisted of touching the stylus to a pad. I remember in 1970 a friend of mine bought a calculator. Mr (Dr./Prof.?) Stoll must have been living in a backwater because in 1972, when he claims to have been astounded by the square root capability of the Friedan, the HP35 was widely available. I seems more like a delay line than real memory and it really was dynamic RAM. I am struggling to understand the memory. Several comments though (what else is new?) How about you? Do you long for the retro look and feel of these old calculators, or are you just happy you don’t have to use one yourself? I would love to have one of these little beauties in my own humble collection. In reality, this was a coil of piano wire into which pulses/vibrations were inserted in one end and read out of the other you have to see it to believe it! And, speaking of memory, the video shows the Friden EC-132’s main storage, which was implemented using something called recirculating audio acoustic memory. Watching this video provides a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division occur almost instantly, but performing a square root operation takes about a second (you may laugh, but this is a lot faster than doing it by hand). There’s also the use of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), which greatly eased the task of performing operations when you had limited memory and processing power.
![friden calculator friden calculator](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-1Jz5X5Cr4Q/maxresdefault.jpg)
At first, you think there are four (strangely thick) boards, but then you discover that each of these four assemblies comprises two boards “folded over” resulting in a sort of 4-layer board.Īnd then there’s the cathode ray tube (CRT) that’s used to display the input values and the results. I love seeing the circuit boards populated with individual transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors. This was one of the very early commercially-available solid-state desktop electronic calculators. Created in the early 1960s, the Friden EC-132 is a thing of beauty and a wonder to behold.