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An astonishing old calculator - Numberphile

Numberphile · 793.8K views · 2017-11-30 · 9:20

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Overview

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

On Hacker News

It is the go-to visual explanation of delay-line memory and early electronic calculators whenever the topic comes up.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2017–2023

Topics

History of computingRecreational & visual mathComputer architecture & CPUs
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cliff stollfriden ec-132delay line memoryvintage computingnumberphile

What people said

kdoherty · 2017-12 · Strong recommendation

There is also a fantastic video where Cliff Stoll describes the Friden EC-132 calculator and shows off its acoustic delay line here: [VIDEO]

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db48x · 2023-08 · Reference

There were a lot of delay–line memories back in the day. It wasn’t just that they didn’t have memory chips; memory chips hadn’t been invented yet. [VIDEO]

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major505 · 2020-10 · Reference

Cool way to store the bits. I saw the other day a video about an old eletronic calculator that stores itens in memory usinglike a piano wire, and microfones, and small speakers, to make the cord vibrate, and store the value. It was the Friden ec-132 [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Numberphile, played through YouTube.

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