Were the CRT calculators Busicom?
One of those was the first thing I ever programmed... Punch cards with an
instruction rate of ten per second!
I seem to recall it had a magnetostrictive coil memory, an acoustic delay line
using wire that behaves like piezo electric stuff does but with magnetism
instead.
Cheers,
Robin.
On 18 Apr 2014, at 13:28, John Rehwinkel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I do recall, however, that one of the Anita nixie calculators had a magnetic
>> memory - a torsion delay line. It was kind of like a clock spring made out
>> of stiff wire. An actuator would twist it at one end and the torsion wave
>> would go round all the coils and appear at the other end some milliseconds
>> later, where it was sensed and fed back to the beginning. So you could store
>> data in it, like a very fast tape loop.
>
> I had a couple of calculators that used that kind of memory. One was a
> Singer/Frieden, I forget the make of the other one. They also used CRTs for
> display, with some clever logic to vector-trace seven segment digits onto the
> screen. They both showed a 3-level stack. Nifty devices, until my sister
> threw them out.
>
> I also had a nixie calculator. It was made back in the days when calculators
> were really expensive, so it had one "math box", and four terminals. It
> could only make one calculation at a time, but since calculators spend most
> of their time waiting, this was apparently not much of a problem. It had a
> bunch of digits, Each terminal had 13 CD66 nixies for the display and a neon
> bulb for the - sign. It had old-style diode "ROM", with boards covered with
> arrays of diodes in various patterns. It died when a power supply capacitor
> failed, making all the nixie displays strobe with an interesting rolling
> effect as the power line frequency beat with the multiplex frequency. I was
> young and poor, and stripped the poor thing for parts. I still have one of
> the display boards, minus one of its CD66 nixies.
>
> - John
>
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