A 21st century mechanical calculator would be made of plastic. In the 1970s Olympia introduced a calculator, the AM 209, made mostly out of plastic to be able to compete with the falling prices of electronic calculators.
Indeed that is probably very true - just like it happened with the very last typewriters which used plastic (!) letter types. Yet this development was driven by cost-reductions due to competition from cheaper alternatives (electronic versions / computers). But I do wonder what a 21st century mechanical calculator would have looked like if its development would not have been driven by the desire to cut cost but a desire to strive for excellence using 21st century mechanical technology. Frankly, I'm inclined to believe the mechanical calculators were fast approaching the end of the road by the 1970s, and that further developments actually _really_ required an amount of flexibility that only electronics could offer. Implementing features we take for granted, such as negative numbers, decimal-point tracking, square roots and (gosh!) logarithms & exponential functions and trigonometric functions doesn't seem like an easy feat to accomplish using just mechanical parts.
What is moving the selectors as the digits are entered - are they on springs with the key lever acting as a stop, or is there some kind of stepped gear system?
I’m not quite sure, but it seems simpler, it seems to me that each key activates an arm which hits the digit wheel at different positions depending og the value of the digit. At the same time this causes different number of pins to protrude which governs the digit added to the accumulator register. It’s a very clever design because the mechanical complexity seems less than earlier calculators despite the ability to enter digits using keys instead of individual levers for each digit position.
The wheels are pinwheels. Each number key 1-9 has an arm that pushes the setting lever of the pinwheel by a defined length of the circumference, hence setting it to its specific digit. Everything else works like a normal Odhner-type mechanical calculator, with the registers turned by 180°.
A 21st century mechanical calculator would be made of plastic. In the 1970s Olympia introduced a calculator, the AM 209, made mostly out of plastic to be able to compete with the falling prices of electronic calculators.
Indeed that is probably very true - just like it happened with the very last typewriters which used plastic (!) letter types. Yet this development was driven by cost-reductions due to competition from cheaper alternatives (electronic versions / computers). But I do wonder what a 21st century mechanical calculator would have looked like if its development would not have been driven by the desire to cut cost but a desire to strive for excellence using 21st century mechanical technology. Frankly, I'm inclined to believe the mechanical calculators were fast approaching the end of the road by the 1970s, and that further developments actually _really_ required an amount of flexibility that only electronics could offer. Implementing features we take for granted, such as negative numbers, decimal-point tracking, square roots and (gosh!) logarithms & exponential functions and trigonometric functions doesn't seem like an easy feat to accomplish using just mechanical parts.
What is moving the selectors as the digits are entered - are they on springs with the key lever acting as a stop, or is there some kind of stepped gear system?
I’m not quite sure, but it seems simpler, it seems to me that each key activates an arm which hits the digit wheel at different positions depending og the value of the digit. At the same time this causes different number of pins to protrude which governs the digit added to the accumulator register. It’s a very clever design because the mechanical complexity seems less than earlier calculators despite the ability to enter digits using keys instead of individual levers for each digit position.
The wheels are pinwheels. Each number key 1-9 has an arm that pushes the setting lever of the pinwheel by a defined length of the circumference, hence setting it to its specific digit.
Everything else works like a normal Odhner-type mechanical calculator, with the registers turned by 180°.
@@19ghost73 So literally a rearwards facing pinwheel with a mechanism for pushing the selector a certain distance?
@@rewindoflow EXACTLY!
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