How about a talking clock radio from the early 1970 that does use any kind of speech synthesis Calculators were expensive In an old Sharp calculator instruction manual I learnt where the ELSIMATE name came from Extra Large Scale Integration. They managed to get all the main functions of a calculator into four main ICs.
The talking radio is neat, I had the same issue as one of the commentors with someone putting fertilizer on a shelf above a piece of equipment, it leaked and corroded the equipment below it.
In same 1974 Dixon's catalogue as the Prinz cassette decks a pocket calculator was almost as much. p.s. I'm surprised they didn't label the picture "simulated display" as with the asngled 7s it certainly looks as if it is.
Nice looking calculator, love the color and the buttons are definately different. I can't remember but is the gold/bronze display normal?
I found an ad from 1983 for this cool Sanyo PC-1250 but there's no way this was $82.50. Maybe just the calculator but not the whole package. This was around when these were getting really hot and some teachers allowed a calculator but didn't know they could store equations. Those were good times.
It's interesting that a lot of these still work great with the exception of the screens that start to bleed. I wonder what they thought the life-span would be?
Found a neat site from Japan, the Crown would be a nice addition to any collection. https://www-dentaku--museum-com.tra...&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_sch=http
While out shopping today I popped in a large charity (thift) store. There was very little of interest apart from this calculator which I bought. Hard to resist a calculator made by the same company as the Space Shuttle especially complete with box, pouch, and instructions. According to http://www.calcuseum.com/SCRAPBOOK/BONUS/12125/1.htm it dates back to 1977. The only other calculator which they had there was a much modern Casio for more money with an LCD matrix display but the painted legends coming off the keys. A colleague had the same problem with one he bought. They literally don't make them like they used to. Most of the old ones used over-moulded keys so the numbers would never wear off.
I'm jealous, Rockwell had the coolest name and logo, something you'd find on the Space Shuttle Support Crew Clothing. I've never seen one before and it looks like the collector value is pretty high. It's surprising that it's made in Hong Kong, I'm pretty sure the big guns, TI and HP were still made here, most likely Texas. Your right about the keys, they still make similar keyboards but it's hard to find an old calculator with cosmetically worn out buttons.
Rockwell took over a U.K. company Sumlock Anita who made the world's first all electronic calculator and even made some Rockwell branded calculators in the U.K. In the 1970s countries were far more likely to apply import duties and companies would do production in countries that avoided that. Hong Kong was a British crown colony so would have been looked on favourably. In the same period I saw Texas Instruments TI30s made in both the USA and Italy and there were significant differences between them e.g. one had hinged keys the other individual ones. http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/texas_instruments_ti-30.html#:~:text=78 x 146 x 35,circuit and the LED display. An eBay search shows me 226 Rockwell calculators. I don't think I have ever seen an LCD one though. They must have decided to leave the market when those became popular.
Looks like they had a pretty big line-up with a ton showing up here on Ebay. I'm surprised I've never seen one, especially with the widely known branding. I wonder if TI was working with Olivetti, have you seen their abandoned factory video.
No I hadn't seen that and found it interesting. In the early 1990s we bought some Olivetti PCs for a customer. They were probably made in that factory. Like a lot of things the dramatic fall in prices worked against many companies. For our work we were using Sun workstations. Those weren't cheap. I ended up with a Sun Ultra 60 which cost over $14000 on my desk as nobody else knew how to use it. Today a $1000 laptop does the same jobs far faster.
It boggles my brain on how these old factories were pretty much locked down and forgotten. In college we got a huge Sun Minicomputer with something like seven terminals from an automaker, in the early 90's. I don't think they knew how to get it back working and I never saw it in use but it had some of the first FEA for automotive applications. Here's another cool video I just watched, local hero, some of the buildings shown are still around town. Cray has a branded building attached to the Mall of America. CDC, Honeywell and Cray manufacturing, for the most part are largely gone. There was a ton of small mom and pop circuit board makers that are now gone.
