Watching this documentary in my smart phone over internet and wondering of how much effort made to reach at this stage and also thinking of the future technology to come 👏👏👏👏👏👏for all the engineers
I've watched this video over 100 times, this in one of this fist lessons I teach my students, because the electronic calculator is for me signifies the beginning of of desktop personal computer, and I've always count on this video being online this is a must for my class ! wish to take part in the preservation of early calculators ! thank you for uploading such an amazing piece of history !
The Casio calculator shown at the very end, during the assembly process, I have one of those for over 20 years now! It runs on a solar cell, needs no battery. I bought mine in Cairns in 1994 and still use it all the time.
I have a Casio scientific calculator that I bought around 1985 and still use every day. It uses a single AA battery that lasts 6-7 years, basically shelf life. 37 years old and still looks new and functions perfectly.
My dad started at Bell Labs in Allentown Pa. in the R and D section in 1958, just as the Transistor age, which I believe was invented by Bell Labs, began. As a very young kid I remember him coming home one day and showing me a Texas instrument POCKET calculator that was approx. four inches wide by about eight to ten inches long and maybe a half inch thick. If my memory is correct he told me that it cost $800.00. At the time dad was travelling between Texas Instruments in Texas and Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ., he was somehow involved in the development of the pocket calculator or the processes needed to make the circuitry, I'm not sure which. A few things occurred to me as I watched the video. After the transistor was invented here the electronics industry in Japan apparently took advantage of that technology ( I also remember having one of those little white plastic transistor radios that were made in Japan in the mid sixty's) and that today our circuitry technology, that was invented in this country, is being made everywhere but here. Why is this and why would our captains of industry allow this to happen? I guess this is how the major car and truck manufacturers ended up with thousands of acres of parked incompleted trucks and cars sitting on fields and racetracks around the country waiting for chips. Makes me wonder.... (Please all you Electronics engineers out there, don't beat me up if some of my facts/ timelines are a little bit incorrect), I'm not and engineer and didn't inherit my dad's vast knowledge of this type of stuff, he had more intelligence about electronics in his little toe than I would ever have.
In England i know from my mum she worked at marconi in the years before transistor radios came along we had built radar and radios they closed down in the 60s I know in the same time 1960s to 1960s we produced TVs echoe Tvs the Valve tube radio and tube before transistor radio in England we made AVOS Test meters and exported around the world englang exported its tools and engineering to india so in the 1950s Tv cameras used seticon tube a kind of LIGHT sensor In the old days TV cameras began using Electronics and Tubes if you ever get a chance to see documentry on the saticon manufactur Its amazing. in 1970s i remember calculators And Transistor radios I wanted to reply only because i wanted to say The people in charge let Other people view the manufacturing but thats only part of the story in every industry be it British motor bikes or tea cups British motor bikes I had a triumph bike But soon became interested in JAPANESE the little honda and the FS1E and suzuki soon we couldn't get enough JAPANESE stuff Same with TVs hitachi and sony trinitron in the UK we Bought more stuff made in Japan or china or Hong Kong! And our manufacturing Abilities Declined to a point We Need The stuff because they Invested in advanced Manufacturing Technologies untill today I have to say they are light years ahead in making stuff For some reason in the UK We stopped making stuff
Business, innovation, science are all people things, not country things. A person is hired at a US company from another country, invents something we say "invented in the US". Was it? As for manufacturing most mo-mos like to call it greed, but it's a little more complex. Suppose you just invented something here in the US that almost everyone in the world would love to buy. Now you need to build a factory and hire 30,000 workers. Investors are lining up to give you all the money you need. Where in the US do you build the factory and provide all those jobs. You live in Dallas. So the city of Dallas says "Hey you invented that here so you should build them here!". Cool. So you look for land. Hmmm, no big empty fields in Dallas. Or in the suburbs. You look further out. You find plenty of land but few potential workers. So you look in other states. Now Dallas and Texas is screaming you greedy SOB. Right now the unemployment rate is 3.4% in the US. Companies from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Brazil and several dozen other countries contact you and show you they already have the factories setup for the most part and plenty of great workers ready to start. And the labor cost in their country means you make $20 profit instead of $1 profit if made in the US. That's normally where the "It's GREED" people stop thinking. You as the business owner do what with the profit? Mosty plow it back into the business. More R&D, improvements, new products. You can hire 20x more inventors with the $20 profit margin and hopefully create 20x more stuff "in the US". But suppose you're a made in the US kind of person so you build your factory, deal with labor shortages so production is lower than expected so you're barely breaking even. But the product is selling well. The rest of the world (including in the US) sees your product and their engineers say they can build a newer better version and manufacture it for 20x lower labor than you. When that hits the market with better features and a much lower price what happens to your sales? Won't be long before you've lost all the profit you've ever made and have to close the factory and layoff everyone. It's a people thing. A "Made in the USA" is not something Americans will pay a huge premium for. A business needs labor. The US right now has a shortage of labor. We are going balls to the wall. And many Americans are dead set against bringing in workers from other countries. And many potential workers can't pass a drug test. So yeah, they want the $30/hour job, but are too high to show up or do the work.
I paid a week's salary for a Ti 10 in 1973. None of my classmates in college at the time had a calculator. Computing orbits was really hard just using a pencil. Square roots were too. Wish I still had it.
When I was in medical school doing physics class, I used a slide ruler and logarithm tables. For sixty students, we had one calculator. That was in 1972. Today, my son is doing his post-doc using the Stanford University mainframe through his 2014 MacBook pro Terminal for calculations in quantum chemistry. How's that for a generation gap? We still both love Jimi Hendrix.
@@deadby15 If you think deeply there can be only one God, no more no less. However, God's names can be limitless, because of unlimited attributes. And God is a Person.
This was a FASCINATING series of documentaries... I never knew much about how the Japanese electronics industry got to where it was at its height, and this actually explains a lot. I actually have an old Texas Instruments LED screen calculator somewhere, dating from the mid-late '70s; it's not Japanese made, as far as I know, but seeing all this stuff has me nostalgic for that kind of thing.
Every calculator I use on a regular basis is vintage, all with vfd displays. I regularilly use my early 70's vintage busicom exec da-80 on my desk at work. no batteries, needs to be plugged in, with individual vfd tubes for each display segment. picked it up at a thrift shop some 8yrs ago for $0.99 and tax, works like new does what i need and is a great conversation piece.
RC286 I use vintage calculators but not that old, I have several HP and Ti that I use from the early 1990's and late 1980's, but I do have older 1970's ones as well, but I don't use them because they eat batteries too fast :-). All of them are pocket scientific calculators though, no business or general use ones.
@@RC-nq7mg I don't think they had VFD displays then, but they may have used RCA Numitron DR2120 tubes back then. Those were 7 segment filament (dim light bulb). I used them in a product I designed in 1973.
@@paulmoffat9306 Busicom exec DA-80, looks like vfd to me. 1972, also have a LLOYD's acumatic 310 with vfd display, 1975, and texas instruments TI-1025 1977 with vfd display.
The Sharp Compet machines, of which I owned 3, were not constructed with all Germanium transistors as stated in the narrative. The Hitachi 2SC284, which drove the cathodes in the nixie tubes, and can be clearly seen in the close-up shot, were indisputably silicon. (All transistors with "2SC" prefix are silicon NPN.) So were most of the logic transistors, which didn't have type numbers, but were housed in tiny ceramic "pill" packages. This was pretty remarkable, as the vast majority of transistors in those days definitely were germanium. I still have many of these transistors, salvaged from the calculators before they were thrown away. After nearly 60 years, they still work just fine, and are just as good as modern ones. I still occasionally use one in a project or experiment.
Ahh, but you may be surprised. While technology in respect to transistors may have shrunk, the technology remains the same. If you're paying attention then you still understand the basics. Although, I am old an a former Nay ET. It wa my life for a period of time.
I just checked the datasheet reference for 2SC284, and it states germanium. Which would be right for an early cylindrical metal can Japanese transistor. And the 2SC prefix just means it's NPN.
No, originally 2SA and 2SB meant germanium PNP and 2SC/2SD were silicon. Something went awry later on, all 2SA were germanium PNP, but2SB coulxd be either, but always PNP. 2SC are always NPN silicon. Usually 2 s d is also NPN silicon, but I think they lost the plot somewhere, because some 2SDs are PNP, 2SC284 is silicon without doubt. 0.7v forward on the junctions. They are amazing in that they compare very well to modern bipolar units.@@michaelturner4457
In college I used a Hewlett Packard HP21. It had an LED display and utilized RPN Logic. 50 years later, I still use it. It is slower than today's calculator but is easier and faster to use because of the RPN logic.
I'm having some insomnia so I put something on to listen to and hopes of falling asleep but now I'm like glued to the edge of my seat (bed)... This is a great documentary, thanks for posting!
I bought a Battery Calculator with a Green LED Display at the Orlando Navy Exchange in April 1976 when I was just starting Basic Electricity and Electronics, BEE in the Navy. Retired in 1995 and worked for Sony for 8 years. Enjoyed all 3 videos.
I got my first electronic calculator while in 7th grade from a local store for $2.99USD with a coupon, a Casio watch with a built-in calculator that is, 1981. I was so happy wearing it while riding my bike home, and can’t wait to show mom and dad!
I serviced many of these made by Toshiba and Hitachi and branded as Singer. The technology was advancing so rapidly that I was on new models about every six months! This required mastery of the dual trace oscilloscope. CRTs, nixie tubes then leds.
That's dumb, they could have built a double room, one cooled, the other where the calculators were and used gloves in walls like they do in bio-hazard laboratory's.
The heart problems could also have been due to overwork, so, going to and fro between very hot and cold must have contributed to the symptoms manifesting themselves. I don't know if overwork was an issue back then.
I remember in 1976 I got my first pocket calculator, a little bigger/thicker than a pack of cigarettes, with red led display. I was in high school. And yes, we all did the "BOOBS" joke on our calculators, LOL 😝 The next year I got a TI programmable calculator, and imagined that the future was in computing. Later that same year, I built my first computer from a kit. When I graduated from HS, I went straight into electronics carrier, in the Bay Area, California. Now I am retired, and living my dream being a musician, and playing with all kinds of fun electronic toys Computers, iPad, synthesizers, etc. This video, brings back great memories, and had me pulling out my original HP 11C, from the 1970s 🙂
I worked and scrimped and saved enough to buy an HP-21 in 1975 as 16 year old in High School. Now I run an HP-21 emulator app on my Note. :-) Everything old is new again.
What a neat series, thank you for putting it up. I started in the computer industry repairing Canon nixie tube discrete calculators, I only wish I had kept one of the service manuals.
I'm about midway through Chris Miller's book Chip War and I found this doco to be a really interesting aside to that, particularly when IC's enter the picture.
All the gamers talking about the need for more powerful CPUs and GPUs should watch this video, how much R&D, how much sweat was shed in development of the calculator the stepping stone to computers
I remember back in the late 60's, I purchased a new HP-35 Calculator for use in university ($500) only to find out a month later, that an electronics parts vendor was having a promotion by Texas Instruments, by giving away a new calculator with a $10 purchase! The TI calculator was USA made. Still have the HP-35, and BTW, the circuit board is plated in GOLD, not solder! No wonder it is still operational.
My 1st calculator in high school in 1974 was the HP-21, which fit in a shirt pocket ($125). The nerds in school carried their calculators in a zip-pouch that hung from their pants belt. One internal rivalry between nerds was over the ownership of HP vs. TI . The super-nerds had the expensive programmable models. I still have my HP-21, but a roommate fried it by improperly unplugging it from the AC power. The stack memory paradigm in the HP's was sort of off-putting to the average non-computer-geek, but it had it's advantages.
I used an HP21 in college and still do to this day. There are so many advantages to the RPN logic and stack. I used to carry it using the belt loop as did many where I went to school.
My Dad was in charge of Quality Control and Customer Satisfaction at an computer building company named EAI (Electronic Associates Incorporated) in Long Branch, New Jersey between 1948 and 1968.
The Casio calculator which you buy today won't last five to six years. Planned obsolecence? The HL-815 calculator I bought in 2016 failed within 3 years (made in Philippines).
My favorite calculator was a Casio talking clock calculator that I bought in Saudi Arabia in 1978. It came in handy at nights I did not have to turn on the light and look for my glasses to check time. I am unable to find a replacement after it died of old age.
I visited the Akihabara district in Tokyo (shown at the 16 minute mark) in 1998. As a nerd, who at the time owned a HP 100LX palmtop computer and HP48S calculator, I was in heaven. This was a great video, IMHO.
This is a really interesting series of videos - Thanks for posting them! I well remember as a teenager tinkering with various projects building amplifiers, radios, burglar alarms and so on - Fascinating!
12:40 WOW. Forget placing a "Made in Japan" sticker on it. Every calculator should come with a signed letter by the R&D team saying "Made with the aweat and blood of the following engineers..."
26:30. Am I now proud to still own such a LC-8 device from sharp ? It still works. I love these green scribbly-looking numbers and the way how the keyboard clicks are sounding. But it is pretty heavy for being just a simple calculator.
This just shows how new all this technology is and that we have no idea how social media will effect society. I suspect institutions and contracts will become more under attack as people dumb themselves down.
when I went to school, we were required to use the slide rule. And then the last year we were required to buy a calculator which cost $85 and weighs as much as a brick
I want a Casio relay calculator after seeing this, very cool piece of vintage kit. Goes along with my 80s Casio keyboard and my 90s Casio G-Shock watch.
My first glimpse of the desktop calculators was around 1973-75 in high school. Our mathematics lab had an array of those big clunky electronic calculators that did not much more than A/S/M/D and maybe a percentage or square root. The digital display was the weird individual numbers formed by wires that glowed like a light bulb. During lunch break we would hang out in the lab and play with the calculators - not having any real problems to solve - just watching the lights and displays change. I did learn to program one of the machines - that took IBM punch cards - to solve a quadratic equation. It was also connected to a 2d plotter that could draw graphs. That was my first exposure to programming. The lab also had a classic Teletype keyboard that communicated to a University computer about 150 miles away. We spent a lot of time on that playing Football with the computer.
I've been VERY slowly working toward updating my ANCIENT site to have exactly that, but sadly, no, I don't have an actual page up. What I do have though is a browsable directory, with a number of pictures. richfiles.solarbotics.net/calc/
The UK has high-speed rail, too, though not everywhere. Coal- and steam-powered locomotives are a thing in the UK, and can provide backup during extreme weather, when electric trains are unable to function.
In 1994 one of friends brother bought calculator from USA which was running on solar power and capable of draw graph of input f(x)=x+y or any complex function. Then it was capable of doing dy/dx integration
The Aleph Zero 101 used a magnetic logic device known as a Parametron, developed by Eiichi Goto at the University of Tokyo and later commercialised by TDK. A Parametron based computer, the PC-1, was also built at the University. Although superseded by advances in transistor technology, a variant of the Parametron using superconducting Josephson junctions, also developed by Eiichi Goto, is the basis for the logic elements of many of today's laboratory quantum computers.
Management usually does not want to spend too much on a "proof of concept". I bet they got their testing rooms after the semiconductor calculator was a success.
It's interesting that the invention of the microprocessor has to do with the fact that Intel wanted to lower the production cost of they calculators by having a VLSI chips that is programmable.
Waitaminute... 17:53 - did Busicom 161 used the magnetic rings as its memory? In 1966 Apollo program used those for moon flights in its navigation computers. They literally used space technologies before they went into space.
Magnetic core memory was pretty standard at the time. (That's where the word "core" in phrases like "core dump" comes from.) The "cool tech" in the Apollo computers was mostly about the ROM weaving and space-saving folding techniques; most core memory was kept on frames.
@@stanrogers5613 AFAIK, ROM-weaving was needed, as the computer ROM and hardware were required to withstand radiation, lightning, temperature extremes, and probably more.
I would really love to find the schematics for the Sony SOBAX 600E from the 50s. I think. Everything lights up. And I can get the Nixies to Rolling Display Test function. However the number key inputs have no functionality. I separated the chassis to look further but all these orange “Chiplet ICCs” I can’t find anything on them or any documents to help me troubleshoot them.
This is fucking mind blowing,am meanhighly automated factory machines,advancements in calculators,the birth of the micro processor,a man toutched the moon in 1969, that's incredible.
I still have the HP41CX. Friends were using Sharp and TI which were very good at the time, have much softer keys, but not quite programmable. The question I have is why Japan has been lagging behind in Hitech in general ? Not only behind the US but China. Lack of innovation, resources, management, geopolitics, population, the lanaguage, or investment ? In what percentage each ?
