 Friden Model 132 Calculator, 1965 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Genre | Technology |
| Founded | San Leandro, California, U.S. |
| Founder | Carl Friden |
| Defunct | 1965 |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | Singer Corporation |
Friden Calculating Machine Company (Friden, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of typewriters and mechanical, later electronic calculators. It was founded by Carl Friden in San Leandro, California, in 1934.
 | This section needs expansionwith: mechanical calculators. You can help by adding to it. (June 2022) |
In 1957, Friden purchased the Commercial Controls Corporation of Rochester, New York. This gave them the Flexowriter teleprinter, an electric typewriter capable of being used as part of unit record equipment developed in World War II for the Department of the Navy to automatically type "regret to inform you" letters to the survivors of fallen servicemen, the predecessor to modern computers. The Flexowriter could be attached to Friden calculators and driven by paper tape to produce bills and other form letters which had names of customers and amounts of bills filled in automatically. Friden eventually expanded into production of a few models of early transistorized computers.
Friden introduced the first fully transistorized desktop electronic calculator, the model EC-130 in June 1963, designed by Robert "Bob" Appleby Ragen. [1] [2] [3] This machine had a 13-digit capacity and a 5-inch CRT display. It used a magnetostrictive delay-line memory, to save money on expensive transistors. The EC-130 sold for $2,200 (equivalent to $21,900in 2023), or about three times the price of comparable electromechanical calculators of the time. It was the first calculator to use reverse Polish notation (RPN), which eliminated the need for parentheses to specify the order of operations in complex calculations. The successor model EC-132, introduced in April 1965, added a square root function.
In 1965 the company was purchased by Singer Business Machines, part of Singer Corporation, but continued operation under the Friden brand name until 1974.
The Singer – Friden Research Center in Oakland, California, later moved to Palo Alto, California (1965 to 1970), was unable to develop a pocket-sized calculator to compete with the corresponding new Japanese products, such as the Busicom, based on Intel 4004 in 1971, Casio Mini and Sharp EL-805 in 1972.
An early Friden electromechanical calculator is shown operating in closeup in the 1949 British film The Small Back Room .
Friden calculators, with their hypnotic mechanical movements, populate the hundreds of desks in the office of the imaginary "Consolidated Life" insurance company in the 1960 motion picture The Apartment .
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers.
The PDP-1 is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the most important computer in the creation of hacker culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bolt, Beranek and Newman and elsewhere. The PDP-1 is the original hardware for playing history's first game on a minicomputer, Steve Russell's Spacewar!
Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators follow their operands, in contrast to prefix or Polish notation (PN), in which operators precede their operands. The notation does not need any parentheses for as long as each operator has a fixed number of operands.
A word processor is an electronic device for text, composing, editing, formatting, and printing.
The ANITA Mark VII and ANITA Mark VIII calculators were launched simultaneously in late 1961 as the world's first all-electronic desktop calculators. Designed and built by the Bell Punch Co. in Britain, and marketed through its Sumlock Comptometer division, they used vacuum tubes and cold-cathode switching tubes in their logic circuits and nixie tubes for their numerical displays.
A function key is a key on a computer or terminal keyboard that can be programmed to cause the operating system or an application program to perform certain actions, a form of soft key. On some keyboards/computers, function keys may have default actions, accessible on power-on.
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been part of the Telecom Italia Group since 2003.
The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter produced by the Friden Calculating Machine Company. It was a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape.
In computer engineering, a logic family is one of two related concepts:
The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, is an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California, and sold and serviced by the Royal Precision Electronic Computer Company, a joint venture with the Royal McBee division of the Royal Typewriter Company. The LGP-30 was first manufactured in 1956, at a retail price of $47,000, equivalent to $530,000 in 2023.
Carl Friden was a Swedish-born, American mechanical engineer and businessman who founded the Friden Calculating Machine Company.
The Marchant Calculating Machine Company was founded in 1911 by Rodney and Alfred Marchant in Oakland, California.
A transistor computer, now often called a second-generation computer, is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The first generation of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky and unreliable. A second-generation computer, through the late 1950s and 1960s featured circuit boards filled with individual transistors and magnetic-core memory. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when integrated circuits started appearing and led to the third-generation computer.
A mechanical computer is a computer built from mechanical components such as levers and gears rather than electronic components. The most common examples are adding machines and mechanical counters, which use the turning of gears to increment output displays. More complex examples could carry out multiplication and division—Friden used a moving head which paused at each column—and even differential analysis. One model, the Ascota 170 accounting machine sold in the 1960s, calculated square roots.
Electrically operated display devices have developed from electromechanical systems for display of text, up to all-electronic devices capable of full-motion 3D color graphic displays. Electromagnetic devices, using a solenoid coil to control a visible flag or flap, were the earliest type, and were used for text displays such as stock market prices and arrival/departure display times. The cathode ray tube was the workhorse of text and video display technology for several decades until being displaced by plasma, liquid crystal (LCD), and solid-state devices such as thin-film transistors (TFTs), LEDs and OLEDs. With the advent of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), integrated circuit (IC) chips, microprocessors, and microelectronic devices, many more individual picture elements ("pixels") could be incorporated into one display device, allowing graphic displays and video.
The IBM 608 Transistor Calculator, a plugboard-programmable unit, was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes and is believed to be the world's first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commercial market. Announced in April 1955, it was released in December 1957. The 608 was withdrawn from marketing in April 1959.
The Sharp QT-8D Micro Compet, a small electronic desktop calculator, was the first mass-produced calculator to have its logic circuitry entirely implemented with LSI integrated circuits (ICs) based on MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology. When it was introduced in late 1969, it was one of the smallest electronic calculators ever produced commercially. Previous electronic calculators had been about the size of a typewriter and had logic circuits built from numerous discrete transistors and diodes or small- to medium-scale ICs. The QT-8D's logic circuits were packed into just four LSI ICs.
The Victor 3900 is the first electronic calculator to have been built entirely of integrated circuits (ICs). For its era, the 3900 is extremely advanced; it has a 4-inch (100 mm) cathode ray tube screen to produce a 5-line display, has separate memory for storing three intermediate results, supports numerical rounding, and is still "smaller than a typewriter".
Benson-Lehner Corporation was an early digital technology company that initially made plotters and other input-output devices that were purchased by branches of the U.S. government during the Cold War. It later marketed high-speed precision cameras used for similar military applications, including nuclear bomb and missile testing. Benson-Lehner’s executives were almost entirely WW2 veterans. Its founders were Bernard Benson, a former British Spitfire pilot, and George Lehner, a UCLA psychology professor and inventor. Benson-Lehner was initially based in Santa Monica and had manufacturing plants in England and France. It was later headquartered in West Los Angeles and Van Nuys.
Bob holds over 80 patents awarded during his work as Director of RD for Friden, and Singer and as Senior Project Engineer at Xerox. He retired from Xerox RD in 1990. He is responsible for the development of the first commercial electronic calculator, the Friden 130, which has been displayed at the Smithsonian.
