Calculators (10) : Lloytron Accumatic 55

A typical chunky mid-1970s calculator. The Lloytron was powered by a Rockwell A1241PA processor and had an eight digital vacuum fluorescent display (actually nine digits but the extra digit is used for the negative sign and memory status). 

As well as the standard arithmetic functions the Lloytron also offers square roots, squares, reciprocals and percentages.

Calculators (9) : Prinztronic MC66

The Prinztronic MC66 was a meaty desktop AC powered calculator from the early 1970s. Made in 1973 and powered by a Rockwell 15352PA processor, the MC66 provided the basic mathematical functions, memory functions and a constant key. It had a 12 digit green vacuum fluorescent display.

The calculator has very pleasing "space age" styling, including the typeface used for the name.

Calculators (8) : Academy

This was a mass-produced calculator from HK, known as the Standard Type 1. Our example bears the name "Academy" though many other names were also carried too including "King Sonic", "Mustang 3000" and "Binatone"! All were the same calculator, manufactured in the late 1970s. The calculator is similar internally and functionally to the Texet 880A.

The calculator is powered by a Texas TMS0972NL and has the basic arithmetic functions, percentages and a memory. The display has eight digits and uses red LEDs.

Calculators (7) : Texet 880A Executive

Texet made this calculator in 1978 in HK, powered by a Texas Instruments TMS0972NL or a MOS MPS-7560 chip. The calculator has the basic arithmetic functions, it can handle negative numbers with the CS key and percentages. 

The calculator has memory store though the eight digit red LED display has no indicator to show the memory is being used. Helpfully there are three separate keys that can clear the memory!

Calculators (6) : Triumph-Adler 814

Also known as the Triumph-Adler EC1M (and built by Omrom in Singapore), the 814 was a large desktop calculator from 1973 built using LSI discrete logic. The calculator came in mains powered (as in my example) or battery powered versions. The calculator has the basic arithmetic functions and a memory. The calculator is designed for heavy duty number crunching in the likes of accounts or payroll departments and has a fold out stand on the back.

There are also a few other function keys along the left-hand side, what A, K, CA and CI do i don't know (though on other calculators K is used for carrying out calculations using a constant), unfortunately the calculator is non-operational. Similarly there is a sliding switch above the display, perhaps something to do with number of decimal places displayed? The display is an eight digit VFD (vacuum fluorescent display).

My week(ly) in 1979

A couple of months ago we uploaded some scans from a Living magazine from 1973 found in Mum's loft. Another magazine has been found, My Weekly from March 1979 and here are a few scans from that. Its not as funky as the 1973 magazine to be honest but old adverts are always of interest.

Even more Living 1973

A final selection of scans from the October 1973 edition of Living Magazine.

More Living in 1973

A few more scans from the October 1973 Living magazine i found in my Mum's loft last week.

Living in 1973

While clearing junk from my Mum's loft yesterday I discovered an October 1973 copy of Living magazine. It was in reasonable condition considering it must have been up in the loft for a number of decades, even surviving a couple of burst pipes! Quite why the magazine was up there is a bit of a mystery as it was bought a few years before my parents bought the house, no doubt for some reason now lost to the mists of time the magazine was left up there. 

I am glad it survived as it offers a fascinating glimpse of life in the UK in the early 1970s. For the next few weeks let's enjoy some period adverts, styles and fashions. And truly get our 8p worth.

IBM 360 and Social Security

A lovely little film which shows how the IBM 360 mainframe works behind the scenes at a Social Security office.

Love the 1970s blog

Time to introduce my latest blog. I've wanted a blog based on the 1970s for some time, and have had a couple of failed attempts to get one off the ground. Love the 1970s is the latest attempt and seems to have taken flight, as it were, so i feel confident to announce it! It is a nostalgic blog which harks back to the pop culture and some major events of fifty years before. Therefore currently the blog is looking at 1970, next year will be 1971! The blog contains music videos, album and movie reviews and photos from the 1970s. I'm not sure what will happen if the blog is still around in 2030, maybe it will just change it's name to Love the 1980s!

Restoring a 6502

Restoring a microchip is much like any other kind of restoration, just on a smaller scale. This website details how a circuit board found in a barn (literally stinking of cow manure) contained a rare early MOS 6502 CPU from May 1976. The 6502 was extracted from the board, cleaned up and still works!

The 6502 is one of the iconic early CPUs of the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s being first produced in 1975, powering the likes of the Apple II (my IIe seen below). Amazingly the CPU is still produced today and used in many embedded systems.

The birth of the word processor (2)

Last time we saw that the IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter which merged the electric typewriter with data storage was the first system marketed as a word processor. To show how a later version of this system works here is part of an IBM training video on the Mag Card II. If nothing else it is a fascinating look at how office work has evolved since the early 1970s.

Adverts of the 70s/80s... an occasional series

MetaFloppy? Name needs some work.

Seasons greetings

I present this lego sculpture of Noddy Holder at Birmingham New Street. My warmest memories of Christmas are from the 1970s, before everything went a bit dark. I still have the tree we used to use in the 1970s, bought from Woolworths in about 1974 I believe. The tinsel will never go off.

The rise of the microcomputer

An interesting video from the Open University discussing the rise of the microcomputer in the 1980s. It highlights the great variety of machines which were released as computers became democratised and were within the aim of normal people and not just corporations and universities.

Adverts of the 70s/80s... an occasional series

Make your Trash80 a whole new animal.

Creating the Apple Lisa (and Mac) user interface

How exactly are graphical user interfaces (GUI) created? Obviously it involves quite a lot of advanced programming and design work but where do you start, especially back in the 1970s when there weren't many examples of GUIs to gain inspiration from? This extraordinary page on the Mac Folklore website has a series of photographs how the Apple Lisa GUI developed from the first basic graphic tests to the finished article which shipped in the early 1980s, and later carried on by the Apple Macintosh to the present day.

What is especially interesting how the Apple UI, with elements still familiar and used today such as the menu at the top, evolved. Early in the Lisa GUI development a softkey menu along the bottom of the screen was the direction the developers took before the abrupt change to a window and mouse based design. Inspired / stolen from Xerox PARC? Well various theories abound, i'm sure there was plenty of inspiration taken but some elements of the GUI are said to predate that.

It is interesting that in 1980 the Lisa had a menu on the top of windows (like Microsoft Windows later went with) instead of along the top of the screen as how the final design used.

COMAL (Common Algorithmic Language)

COMAL was a programming language first developed in Denmark in 1973 by Borge R. Christensen and Benedict Lofstedt [1]. The language was a structured language and heavily influenced by contemporary popular educational languages including BASIC and Pascal, indeed the intention of the developers of COMAL was to try and combine the simplicity of BASIC with the power of Pascal [2].

What made COMAL stand out was that it was available for 8-bit microcomputers in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was one of the few structured languages available for those computers at the time. Though like a number of "alternative" languages (like Forth on the Jupiter Ace) BASIC proved impossible to dislodge as the language "everyone" had.

COMAL did have some success though and is still used to this day as a teaching language, it was especially popular in Ireland in the 1980s where Apple supplied around five hundred Apple IIs running COMAL-80 to schools. Earlier versions of COMAL had no graphics commands but these were added later on especially to Commodore implementations of the language which included turtle graphics.

Now for some examples of COMAL, if you are familiar with languages like BASIC then COMAL will seem very familiar:

0010 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

0010 INPUT AMOUNT
0020 PRINT "PLEASE PAY ", AMOUNT

0010 PRINT "HOW MANY TIMES?"
0020 INPUT TIMES
0030 FOR NO:=1 TO TIMES DO
0040  PRINT "HELLO NUMBER ", NO
0050 NEXT NO

[1] John Kelly, Foundations in Computer Studies with COMAL (2nd Edition) (Educational Company of Ireland, 1984) p. vii
[2] Borge R. Christensen, Beginning COMAL (Ellis Horwood, 1982) p. 6

Adverts of the 70s/80s... an occasional series

A new irregular series delving into the mysterious world of 1970s and 1980s print advertising.