Comments on Dark Roasted Blend: Stunningly Intricate: Curta Mechanical Calculator

Check out the Wikipedia article on Jacquard looms....

2008-10-02T04:07:00.000-07:00

Check out the Wikipedia article on Jacquard looms. Punch card driven Computer Aided Manufacturing waaaay before IBM developed punch cards.

I remember an article in _Byte_, back in the Seven...

2008-10-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

I remember an article in _Byte_, back in the Seventies, talking about how portable music boxes - many the size and shape of goose eggs, built as the handles of canes - had greater memory storage density than any electronic memory available at the time the article was written.

Imagine something like that mated to an advanced Curta to provide operating system and non-volatile memory.

I still have my Curta. It's the larger of the two ...

2008-09-22T23:35:00.000-07:00

I still have my Curta. It's the larger of the two models.
You'll never guess what we used it for. Doing Time/Speed/Distance car rallyes with the Sports Car Club of America.

Those larger table mounted calc look very familiar...

2008-09-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

Those larger table mounted calc look very familiar. When I started college ('72), only the engineers had electronic calculators - HPs were THE status symbol. Us chemists had to do with mechanical computation machines for the first couple of years. I don't remember much about them except you set up the computation by twirling dials, then hit some switch and the thing went into overdirve; stuff whirred, turned, clicked, and clacked until ...ding...out came an answer. Very cool. I wish I'd had the foresight to snag one once electronic hand calculators took off.

These were very popular with car rallyists in the ...

2008-09-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

These were very popular with car rallyists in the 60's and early 70's to calculate the time you should be at a particular spot. My navigator used one for many years and I have fond memories of its subtle clicks and grinds. It was perfectly adapted to update the time going into a car rallye checkpoint, you simply spun the crank once for every .01 mile and checked this against the clock. Specialized microprocessor based computers eventually obsoleted them, but not until the late 70's.

Ah well, first William Gibson wrote about them and...

2008-09-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ah well, first William Gibson wrote about them and I could not longer to buy one. Now you picked up on it, dang it, so I'll still be unable to acquire one!

Almost as fun: slide rules!

look at this:Soviet calculators collection

2008-09-08T05:07:00.000-07:00

look at this:
Soviet calculators collection

I used one of those calculators... my father was a...

2008-09-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

I used one of those calculators... my father was an engineer and had one in his office.

Yes it was a marvel, the only device of it's type that was really portable.

As I dimly recall, it was quite expensive back in the day.

It is a shame that while incarcerated and working ...

2008-09-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

It is a shame that while incarcerated and working on a mechanical calculator, the fellows over at Bletchly Park were working on building programmable computers.

Wow! They sure dont make them like they used to no...

2008-09-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Wow! They sure dont make them like they used to now do they! LOL.

Jiff
www.anonymize.kr.tc

There is a museum in Bonn, Germany called Arithmeu...

2008-09-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

There is a museum in Bonn, Germany called Arithmeum full of these types of calculators. Even a few with manuals so you can try them out.

"The Arithmeum was openend in 1999. With over 1,200 objects it has the world's largest collection of historical mechanical calculating machines. The museum is affiliated with the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics." (Wikipedia article on University of Bonn)