Watching this documentary in my smart phone over internet and wondering of how much effort made to reach at this stage and also thinking of the future technology to come 👏👏👏👏👏👏for all the engineers
I've watched this video over 100 times, this in one of this fist lessons I teach my students, because the electronic calculator is for me signifies the beginning of of desktop personal computer, and I've always count on this video being online this is a must for my class ! wish to take part in the preservation of early calculators ! thank you for uploading such an amazing piece of history !
The Casio calculator shown at the very end, during the assembly process, I have one of those for over 20 years now! It runs on a solar cell, needs no battery. I bought mine in Cairns in 1994 and still use it all the time.
I have a Casio scientific calculator that I bought around 1985 and still use every day. It uses a single AA battery that lasts 6-7 years, basically shelf life. 37 years old and still looks new and functions perfectly.
My dad started at Bell Labs in Allentown Pa. in the R and D section in 1958, just as the Transistor age, which I believe was invented by Bell Labs, began. As a very young kid I remember him coming home one day and showing me a Texas instrument POCKET calculator that was approx. four inches wide by about eight to ten inches long and maybe a half inch thick. If my memory is correct he told me that it cost $800.00. At the time dad was travelling between Texas Instruments in Texas and Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ., he was somehow involved in the development of the pocket calculator or the processes needed to make the circuitry, I'm not sure which. A few things occurred to me as I watched the video. After the transistor was invented here the electronics industry in Japan apparently took advantage of that technology ( I also remember having one of those little white plastic transistor radios that were made in Japan in the mid sixty's) and that today our circuitry technology, that was invented in this country, is being made everywhere but here. Why is this and why would our captains of industry allow this to happen? I guess this is how the major car and truck manufacturers ended up with thousands of acres of parked incompleted trucks and cars sitting on fields and racetracks around the country waiting for chips. Makes me wonder.... (Please all you Electronics engineers out there, don't beat me up if some of my facts/ timelines are a little bit incorrect), I'm not and engineer and didn't inherit my dad's vast knowledge of this type of stuff, he had more intelligence about electronics in his little toe than I would ever have.
In England i know from my mum she worked at marconi in the years before transistor radios came along we had built radar and radios they closed down in the 60s I know in the same time 1960s to 1960s we produced TVs echoe Tvs the Valve tube radio and tube before transistor radio in England we made AVOS Test meters and exported around the world englang exported its tools and engineering to india so in the 1950s Tv cameras used seticon tube a kind of LIGHT sensor In the old days TV cameras began using Electronics and Tubes if you ever get a chance to see documentry on the saticon manufactur Its amazing. in 1970s i remember calculators And Transistor radios I wanted to reply only because i wanted to say The people in charge let Other people view the manufacturing but thats only part of the story in every industry be it British motor bikes or tea cups British motor bikes I had a triumph bike But soon became interested in JAPANESE the little honda and the FS1E and suzuki soon we couldn't get enough JAPANESE stuff Same with TVs hitachi and sony trinitron in the UK we Bought more stuff made in Japan or china or Hong Kong! And our manufacturing Abilities Declined to a point We Need The stuff because they Invested in advanced Manufacturing Technologies untill today I have to say they are light years ahead in making stuff For some reason in the UK We stopped making stuff
Business, innovation, science are all people things, not country things. A person is hired at a US company from another country, invents something we say "invented in the US". Was it? As for manufacturing most mo-mos like to call it greed, but it's a little more complex. Suppose you just invented something here in the US that almost everyone in the world would love to buy. Now you need to build a factory and hire 30,000 workers. Investors are lining up to give you all the money you need. Where in the US do you build the factory and provide all those jobs. You live in Dallas. So the city of Dallas says "Hey you invented that here so you should build them here!". Cool. So you look for land. Hmmm, no big empty fields in Dallas. Or in the suburbs. You look further out. You find plenty of land but few potential workers. So you look in other states. Now Dallas and Texas is screaming you greedy SOB. Right now the unemployment rate is 3.4% in the US. Companies from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Brazil and several dozen other countries contact you and show you they already have the factories setup for the most part and plenty of great workers ready to start. And the labor cost in their country means you make $20 profit instead of $1 profit if made in the US. That's normally where the "It's GREED" people stop thinking. You as the business owner do what with the profit? Mosty plow it back into the business. More R&D, improvements, new products. You can hire 20x more inventors with the $20 profit margin and hopefully create 20x more stuff "in the US". But suppose you're a made in the US kind of person so you build your factory, deal with labor shortages so production is lower than expected so you're barely breaking even. But the product is selling well. The rest of the world (including in the US) sees your product and their engineers say they can build a newer better version and manufacture it for 20x lower labor than you. When that hits the market with better features and a much lower price what happens to your sales? Won't be long before you've lost all the profit you've ever made and have to close the factory and layoff everyone. It's a people thing. A "Made in the USA" is not something Americans will pay a huge premium for. A business needs labor. The US right now has a shortage of labor. We are going balls to the wall. And many Americans are dead set against bringing in workers from other countries. And many potential workers can't pass a drug test. So yeah, they want the $30/hour job, but are too high to show up or do the work.
This was a FASCINATING series of documentaries... I never knew much about how the Japanese electronics industry got to where it was at its height, and this actually explains a lot. I actually have an old Texas Instruments LED screen calculator somewhere, dating from the mid-late '70s; it's not Japanese made, as far as I know, but seeing all this stuff has me nostalgic for that kind of thing.
Every calculator I use on a regular basis is vintage, all with vfd displays. I regularilly use my early 70's vintage busicom exec da-80 on my desk at work. no batteries, needs to be plugged in, with individual vfd tubes for each display segment. picked it up at a thrift shop some 8yrs ago for $0.99 and tax, works like new does what i need and is a great conversation piece.
RC286 I use vintage calculators but not that old, I have several HP and Ti that I use from the early 1990's and late 1980's, but I do have older 1970's ones as well, but I don't use them because they eat batteries too fast :-). All of them are pocket scientific calculators though, no business or general use ones.
@@RC-nq7mg I don't think they had VFD displays then, but they may have used RCA Numitron DR2120 tubes back then. Those were 7 segment filament (dim light bulb). I used them in a product I designed in 1973.
@@paulmoffat9306 Busicom exec DA-80, looks like vfd to me. 1972, also have a LLOYD's acumatic 310 with vfd display, 1975, and texas instruments TI-1025 1977 with vfd display.
I worked and scrimped and saved enough to buy an HP-21 in 1975 as 16 year old in High School. Now I run an HP-21 emulator app on my Note. :-) Everything old is new again.
I'm having some insomnia so I put something on to listen to and hopes of falling asleep but now I'm like glued to the edge of my seat (bed)... This is a great documentary, thanks for posting!
The Sharp Compet machines, of which I owned 3, were not constructed with all Germanium transistors as stated in the narrative. The Hitachi 2SC284, which drove the cathodes in the nixie tubes, and can be clearly seen in the close-up shot, were indisputably silicon. (All transistors with "2SC" prefix are silicon NPN.) So were most of the logic transistors, which didn't have type numbers, but were housed in tiny ceramic "pill" packages. This was pretty remarkable, as the vast majority of transistors in those days definitely were germanium. I still have many of these transistors, salvaged from the calculators before they were thrown away. After nearly 60 years, they still work just fine, and are just as good as modern ones. I still occasionally use one in a project or experiment.
Ahh, but you may be surprised. While technology in respect to transistors may have shrunk, the technology remains the same. If you're paying attention then you still understand the basics. Although, I am old an a former Nay ET. It wa my life for a period of time.
I just checked the datasheet reference for 2SC284, and it states germanium. Which would be right for an early cylindrical metal can Japanese transistor. And the 2SC prefix just means it's NPN.
No, originally 2SA and 2SB meant germanium PNP and 2SC/2SD were silicon. Something went awry later on, all 2SA were germanium PNP, but2SB coulxd be either, but always PNP. 2SC are always NPN silicon. Usually 2 s d is also NPN silicon, but I think they lost the plot somewhere, because some 2SDs are PNP, 2SC284 is silicon without doubt. 0.7v forward on the junctions. They are amazing in that they compare very well to modern bipolar units.@@michaelturner4457
When I was in medical school doing physics class, I used a slide ruler and logarithm tables. For sixty students, we had one calculator. That was in 1972. Today, my son is doing his post-doc using the Stanford University mainframe through his 2014 MacBook pro Terminal for calculations in quantum chemistry. How's that for a generation gap? We still both love Jimi Hendrix.
@@deadby15 If you think deeply there can be only one God, no more no less. However, God's names can be limitless, because of unlimited attributes. And God is a Person.
I bought a Battery Calculator with a Green LED Display at the Orlando Navy Exchange in April 1976 when I was just starting Basic Electricity and Electronics, BEE in the Navy. Retired in 1995 and worked for Sony for 8 years. Enjoyed all 3 videos.
I got my first electronic calculator while in 7th grade from a local store for $2.99USD with a coupon, a Casio watch with a built-in calculator that is, 1981. I was so happy wearing it while riding my bike home, and can’t wait to show mom and dad!
Antes da década de 70 dizem que o homem já estava pisando na lua , saindo de lá e retornando em segurança para a terra, enquanto aqui estávamos engatinhando tentando aprimorar a calculadora.
I serviced many of these made by Toshiba and Hitachi and branded as Singer. The technology was advancing so rapidly that I was on new models about every six months! This required mastery of the dual trace oscilloscope. CRTs, nixie tubes then leds.
I paid a week's salary for a Ti 10 in 1973. None of my classmates in college at the time had a calculator. Computing orbits was really hard just using a pencil. Square roots were too. Wish I still had it.
The Aleph Zero 101 used a magnetic logic device known as a Parametron, developed by Eiichi Goto at the University of Tokyo and later commercialised by TDK. A Parametron based computer, the PC-1, was also built at the University. Although superseded by advances in transistor technology, a variant of the Parametron using superconducting Josephson junctions, also developed by Eiichi Goto, is the basis for the logic elements of many of today's laboratory quantum computers.
In college I used a Hewlett Packard HP21. It had an LED display and utilized RPN Logic. 50 years later, I still use it. It is slower than today's calculator but is easier and faster to use because of the RPN logic.
I remember in 1976 I got my first pocket calculator, a little bigger/thicker than a pack of cigarettes, with red led display. I was in high school. And yes, we all did the "BOOBS" joke on our calculators, LOL 😝 The next year I got a TI programmable calculator, and imagined that the future was in computing. Later that same year, I built my first computer from a kit. When I graduated from HS, I went straight into electronics carrier, in the Bay Area, California. Now I am retired, and living my dream being a musician, and playing with all kinds of fun electronic toys Computers, iPad, synthesizers, etc. This video, brings back great memories, and had me pulling out my original HP 11C, from the 1970s 🙂
What a neat series, thank you for putting it up. I started in the computer industry repairing Canon nixie tube discrete calculators, I only wish I had kept one of the service manuals.
I'm about midway through Chris Miller's book Chip War and I found this doco to be a really interesting aside to that, particularly when IC's enter the picture.
This is a really interesting series of videos - Thanks for posting them! I well remember as a teenager tinkering with various projects building amplifiers, radios, burglar alarms and so on - Fascinating!
Thank you, RC286, for posting this video! Sadly, it seems the producers didn't have anyone with technical knowledge check the writing and narration for errors. Errata: 25:12 Sharp Micro Compet QT-8D, not "9T-8D" 27:45 "with polyvinyl chloride wires" should have been "with polyvinyl chloride insulated wires"
My Dad was in charge of Quality Control and Customer Satisfaction at an computer building company named EAI (Electronic Associates Incorporated) in Long Branch, New Jersey between 1948 and 1968.
All the gamers talking about the need for more powerful CPUs and GPUs should watch this video, how much R&D, how much sweat was shed in development of the calculator the stepping stone to computers
I visited the Akihabara district in Tokyo (shown at the 16 minute mark) in 1998. As a nerd, who at the time owned a HP 100LX palmtop computer and HP48S calculator, I was in heaven. This was a great video, IMHO.
26:30. Am I now proud to still own such a LC-8 device from sharp ? It still works. I love these green scribbly-looking numbers and the way how the keyboard clicks are sounding. But it is pretty heavy for being just a simple calculator.
My favorite calculator was a Casio talking clock calculator that I bought in Saudi Arabia in 1978. It came in handy at nights I did not have to turn on the light and look for my glasses to check time. I am unable to find a replacement after it died of old age.
That's dumb, they could have built a double room, one cooled, the other where the calculators were and used gloves in walls like they do in bio-hazard laboratory's.
The heart problems could also have been due to overwork, so, going to and fro between very hot and cold must have contributed to the symptoms manifesting themselves. I don't know if overwork was an issue back then.
I want a Casio relay calculator after seeing this, very cool piece of vintage kit. Goes along with my 80s Casio keyboard and my 90s Casio G-Shock watch.
12:40 WOW. Forget placing a "Made in Japan" sticker on it. Every calculator should come with a signed letter by the R&D team saying "Made with the aweat and blood of the following engineers..."
My first glimpse of the desktop calculators was around 1973-75 in high school. Our mathematics lab had an array of those big clunky electronic calculators that did not much more than A/S/M/D and maybe a percentage or square root. The digital display was the weird individual numbers formed by wires that glowed like a light bulb. During lunch break we would hang out in the lab and play with the calculators - not having any real problems to solve - just watching the lights and displays change. I did learn to program one of the machines - that took IBM punch cards - to solve a quadratic equation. It was also connected to a 2d plotter that could draw graphs. That was my first exposure to programming. The lab also had a classic Teletype keyboard that communicated to a University computer about 150 miles away. We spent a lot of time on that playing Football with the computer.
This just shows how new all this technology is and that we have no idea how social media will effect society. I suspect institutions and contracts will become more under attack as people dumb themselves down.
The Casio calculator which you buy today won't last five to six years. Planned obsolecence? The HL-815 calculator I bought in 2016 failed within 3 years (made in Philippines).
I remember back in the late 60's, I purchased a new HP-35 Calculator for use in university ($500) only to find out a month later, that an electronics parts vendor was having a promotion by Texas Instruments, by giving away a new calculator with a $10 purchase! The TI calculator was USA made. Still have the HP-35, and BTW, the circuit board is plated in GOLD, not solder! No wonder it is still operational.
My 1st calculator in high school in 1974 was the HP-21, which fit in a shirt pocket ($125). The nerds in school carried their calculators in a zip-pouch that hung from their pants belt. One internal rivalry between nerds was over the ownership of HP vs. TI . The super-nerds had the expensive programmable models. I still have my HP-21, but a roommate fried it by improperly unplugging it from the AC power. The stack memory paradigm in the HP's was sort of off-putting to the average non-computer-geek, but it had it's advantages.
I used an HP21 in college and still do to this day. There are so many advantages to the RPN logic and stack. I used to carry it using the belt loop as did many where I went to school.
I've been VERY slowly working toward updating my ANCIENT site to have exactly that, but sadly, no, I don't have an actual page up. What I do have though is a browsable directory, with a number of pictures. richfiles.solarbotics.net/calc/
In 1994 one of friends brother bought calculator from USA which was running on solar power and capable of draw graph of input f(x)=x+y or any complex function. Then it was capable of doing dy/dx integration
Waitaminute... 17:53 - did Busicom 161 used the magnetic rings as its memory? In 1966 Apollo program used those for moon flights in its navigation computers. They literally used space technologies before they went into space.
Magnetic core memory was pretty standard at the time. (That's where the word "core" in phrases like "core dump" comes from.) The "cool tech" in the Apollo computers was mostly about the ROM weaving and space-saving folding techniques; most core memory was kept on frames.
@@stanrogers5613 AFAIK, ROM-weaving was needed, as the computer ROM and hardware were required to withstand radiation, lightning, temperature extremes, and probably more.
The UK has high-speed rail, too, though not everywhere. Coal- and steam-powered locomotives are a thing in the UK, and can provide backup during extreme weather, when electric trains are unable to function.
I would really love to find the schematics for the Sony SOBAX 600E from the 50s. I think. Everything lights up. And I can get the Nixies to Rolling Display Test function. However the number key inputs have no functionality. I separated the chassis to look further but all these orange “Chiplet ICCs” I can’t find anything on them or any documents to help me troubleshoot them.
I still have the HP41CX. Friends were using Sharp and TI which were very good at the time, have much softer keys, but not quite programmable. The question I have is why Japan has been lagging behind in Hitech in general ? Not only behind the US but China. Lack of innovation, resources, management, geopolitics, population, the lanaguage, or investment ? In what percentage each ?
It's interesting that the invention of the microprocessor has to do with the fact that Intel wanted to lower the production cost of they calculators by having a VLSI chips that is programmable.
Now they can he purchased at Dollar Tree for $1.25. Back in the 70s I saved my allowance to buy a 6 digit Commadore at The Treasury for $25. It was so cool.
I still remember my 1st calculator way back when. It was a Casio with the fluorescent display and cost, then, $125 on sale! LOL And it was basic. Just add, subtract, multiply, divide. The last calculator I bought to just keep in the car, I bought for a whole, $4.00 (I think it was) and has scientific functions. The stupid thing actually works! LOL
Great. Thanks for this amazing story. May be the new generation can't evaluate it properly. I remember that i have seen electronic calculator first time in 1977 when i was 6yesrs old. It was soviet pocket calculator. I was shocked its possibilities. Later i had a texas instruments calculator made in japan. It had statistical functions so i was almost king of math in my class :)))). It's interesting but it works nowadays. Also my friend had Japan super thin calculator with solar panel which can be placed into notebook between paper sheets. It could perform only simple operations but seems like a extraterrestrial thing.
when I went to school, we were required to use the slide rule. And then the last year we were required to buy a calculator which cost $85 and weighs as much as a brick
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. agreed Wednesday to buy control of financially struggling Sharp Corp. for ¥389 billion ($3.5 billion) in the first takeover of a major Japanese electronics producer by a foreign company. The agreement by Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn,
This is fucking mind blowing,am meanhighly automated factory machines,advancements in calculators,the birth of the micro processor,a man toutched the moon in 1969, that's incredible.
Although these series of videos provide invaluable content for the history of science, the editing is terrible and the chronology of events is a big mess. You certainly need to watch it all over again or rewind several times to put it all firmly back in place. Anyway, it's a pleasure to watch and then meditate about technology and the rapid flow of scientific and technical progress not to mention the power of randomness and serendipity driving lots of fundamental breakthroughs.
The way I heard it Apollo didn't trust the computer they managed to get together, and had some back up tech, like sextants. I think it may have been more useful for the lander as it was used though. And it had a non critical error from someone setting it up wrong.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) worked very well, was highly dependable, had lots of firsts, and had plenty of advanced functionality not found for several decades in modern operating systems. During the mission of Apollo 11, the computer received junk data from a misbehaving sensor unit, which the computer couldn't handle properly, but was wisely designed to disregard this data on operator command. The Apollo Guidance Computer used some of the components that were later made for Japanese calculators.
this was an expensive lesson in global manufacturing capability. Faster, Cheaper, Better. You need to go from idea to production while making a profit in about 6 months or you'll be crushed.
We have to thank the Japanese calculator industry for the microprocessor - Busycalc (?) Edit..Busicom oops haha...as I continue watching...ordered an LSI chip from semiconductor memory makers Intel in the late 60s. Seeing how complex the Japanese engineers had envisioned their chip Ted Hoff suggested that they use a programmable general purpose logic device. The 4004 was born. The rest is history of course.
![SANYO - Breaking the Mold [NHK documentary]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/naCWs7WmLm8/mqdefault.jpg)
Watching this documentary in my smart phone over internet and wondering of how much effort made to reach at this stage and also thinking of the future technology to come 👏👏👏👏👏👏for all the engineers
I've watched this video over 100 times, this in one of this fist lessons I teach my students, because the electronic calculator is for me signifies the beginning of of desktop personal computer, and I've always count on this video being online this is a must for my class ! wish to take part in the preservation of early calculators ! thank you for uploading such an amazing piece of history !
Agreed, it brought all components needed for processing onto one die.
The next logical step was to expand capabilities to do more than just math.
The display of all the calculators laid out is f****** incredible honestly so many of them there I can't imagine how long that took to set up
The Casio calculator shown at the very end, during the assembly process, I have one of those for over 20 years now! It runs on a solar cell, needs no battery. I bought mine in Cairns in 1994 and still use it all the time.
The Casio HS-8G? They were built to last, MADE IN JAPAN in the 1990s.
@@Crazytesseract rpx
I think my mom has that one too. It's a pretty basic calculator.
I have a Casio scientific calculator that I bought around 1985 and still use every day. It uses a single AA battery that lasts 6-7 years, basically shelf life. 37 years old and still looks new and functions perfectly.
There needs to be a full documentary or movie about those 4 engineers from SHARP. I would seriously love that
The legendary Casio FX3600P was our gun in high school in 80's.
gun?
My dad started at Bell Labs in Allentown Pa. in the R and D section in 1958, just as the Transistor age, which I believe was invented by Bell Labs, began. As a very young kid I remember him coming home one day and showing me a Texas instrument POCKET calculator that was approx. four inches wide by about eight to ten inches long and maybe a half inch thick. If my memory is correct he told me that it cost $800.00. At the time dad was travelling between Texas Instruments in Texas and Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ., he was somehow involved in the development of the pocket calculator or the processes needed to make the circuitry, I'm not sure which. A few things occurred to me as I watched the video. After the transistor was invented here the electronics industry in Japan apparently took advantage of that technology ( I also remember having one of those little white plastic transistor radios that were made in Japan in the mid sixty's) and that today our circuitry technology, that was invented in this country, is being made everywhere but here. Why is this and why would our captains of industry allow this to happen? I guess this is how the major car and truck manufacturers ended up with thousands of acres of parked incompleted trucks and cars sitting on fields and racetracks around the country waiting for chips. Makes me wonder.... (Please all you Electronics engineers out there, don't beat me up if some of my facts/ timelines are a little bit incorrect), I'm not and engineer and didn't inherit my dad's vast knowledge of this type of stuff, he had more intelligence about electronics in his little toe than I would ever have.
In England i know from my mum she worked at marconi in the years before transistor radios came along we had built radar and radios they closed down in the 60s I know in the same time 1960s to 1960s we produced TVs echoe Tvs the Valve tube radio and tube before transistor radio in England we made AVOS Test meters and exported around the world englang exported its tools and engineering to india so in the 1950s
Tv cameras used seticon tube a kind of LIGHT sensor
In the old days TV cameras began using Electronics and Tubes if you ever get a chance to see documentry on the saticon manufactur
Its amazing. in 1970s i remember calculators
And Transistor radios
I wanted to reply only because i wanted to say
The people in charge let Other people view the manufacturing but thats only part of the story in every industry be it British motor bikes or tea cups
British motor bikes
I had a triumph bike
But soon became interested in JAPANESE the little honda and the FS1E and suzuki soon we couldn't get enough JAPANESE stuff
Same with TVs hitachi and sony trinitron in the UK we
Bought more stuff made in Japan or china or Hong Kong! And our manufacturing Abilities Declined to a point
We Need The stuff because they Invested in advanced
Manufacturing Technologies untill today
I have to say they are light years ahead in making stuff
For some reason in the UK
We stopped making stuff
It's called greed, and GREED is killing this country !
@Malcolm Jacobs they don't care about America. They can make MORE money screwing America
Business, innovation, science are all people things, not country things. A person is hired at a US company from another country, invents something we say "invented in the US". Was it?
As for manufacturing most mo-mos like to call it greed, but it's a little more complex. Suppose you just invented something here in the US that almost everyone in the world would love to buy. Now you need to build a factory and hire 30,000 workers. Investors are lining up to give you all the money you need. Where in the US do you build the factory and provide all those jobs. You live in Dallas. So the city of Dallas says "Hey you invented that here so you should build them here!". Cool. So you look for land. Hmmm, no big empty fields in Dallas. Or in the suburbs. You look further out. You find plenty of land but few potential workers.
So you look in other states. Now Dallas and Texas is screaming you greedy SOB.
Right now the unemployment rate is 3.4% in the US. Companies from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Brazil and several dozen other countries contact you and show you they already have the factories setup for the most part and plenty of great workers ready to start. And the labor cost in their country means you make $20 profit instead of $1 profit if made in the US.
That's normally where the "It's GREED" people stop thinking. You as the business owner do what with the profit? Mosty plow it back into the business. More R&D, improvements, new products. You can hire 20x more inventors with the $20 profit margin and hopefully create 20x more stuff "in the US".
But suppose you're a made in the US kind of person so you build your factory, deal with labor shortages so production is lower than expected so you're barely breaking even. But the product is selling well. The rest of the world (including in the US) sees your product and their engineers say they can build a newer better version and manufacture it for 20x lower labor than you. When that hits the market with better features and a much lower price what happens to your sales?
Won't be long before you've lost all the profit you've ever made and have to close the factory and layoff everyone.
It's a people thing. A "Made in the USA" is not something Americans will pay a huge premium for.
A business needs labor. The US right now has a shortage of labor. We are going balls to the wall. And many Americans are dead set against bringing in workers from other countries. And many potential workers can't pass a drug test. So yeah, they want the $30/hour job, but are too high to show up or do the work.
@@enriqueroman62 Greed, as you say, built this country and continues to build it.
This was a FASCINATING series of documentaries... I never knew much about how the Japanese electronics industry got to where it was at its height, and this actually explains a lot.
I actually have an old Texas Instruments LED screen calculator somewhere, dating from the mid-late '70s; it's not Japanese made, as far as I know, but seeing all this stuff has me nostalgic for that kind of thing.
Every calculator I use on a regular basis is vintage, all with vfd displays. I regularilly use my early 70's vintage busicom exec da-80 on my desk at work. no batteries, needs to be plugged in, with individual vfd tubes for each display segment. picked it up at a thrift shop some 8yrs ago for $0.99 and tax, works like new does what i need and is a great conversation piece.
RC286 I use vintage calculators but not that old, I have several HP and Ti that I use from the early 1990's and late 1980's, but I do have older 1970's ones as well, but I don't use them because they eat batteries too fast :-). All of them are pocket scientific calculators though, no business or general use ones.
@@RC-nq7mg I don't think they had VFD displays then, but they may have used RCA Numitron DR2120 tubes back then. Those were 7 segment filament (dim light bulb). I used them in a product I designed in 1973.
@@paulmoffat9306 Busicom exec DA-80, looks like vfd to me. 1972, also have a LLOYD's acumatic 310 with vfd display, 1975, and texas instruments TI-1025 1977 with vfd display.
1❤pp😊😊❤❤❤ see see XD XD,❤ your ❤@@❤❤
That"s crazy to think how far we've come in just 50 years
And now we're almost dead
@@abc-ni9uw Speak for yourself! I'm turning 50 and I am enjoying more fruits of modern humanity than most have till this day. Fatalistic outlook.
@MorbidManMusic Oh, we have studied and learned humanity fine. Some choose not to practice or perfect this skill.
It excites and enthralls me. I'm an older fella with eyes wide open!
And after 20 years most industries (as we know them today) will come to an halt. Wait and watch.
I worked and scrimped and saved enough to buy an HP-21 in 1975 as 16 year old in High School. Now I run an HP-21 emulator app on my Note. :-) Everything old is new again.
I'm having some insomnia so I put something on to listen to and hopes of falling asleep but now I'm like glued to the edge of my seat (bed)...
This is a great documentary, thanks for posting!
The Sharp Compet machines, of which I owned 3, were not constructed with all Germanium transistors as stated in the narrative. The Hitachi 2SC284, which drove the cathodes in the nixie tubes, and can be clearly seen in the close-up shot, were indisputably silicon. (All transistors with "2SC" prefix are silicon NPN.) So were most of the logic transistors, which didn't have type numbers, but were housed in tiny ceramic "pill" packages. This was pretty remarkable, as the vast majority of transistors in those days definitely were germanium. I still have many of these transistors, salvaged from the calculators before they were thrown away. After nearly 60 years, they still work just fine, and are just as good as modern ones. I still occasionally use one in a project or experiment.
I doubt anyone today knows what a NPN or PNP or CRT means lol...who is replacing yesterday tech?
Ahh, but you may be surprised. While technology in respect to transistors may have shrunk, the technology remains the same. If you're paying attention then you still understand the basics. Although, I am old an a former Nay ET. It wa my life for a period of time.
I just checked the datasheet reference for 2SC284, and it states germanium. Which would be right for an early cylindrical metal can Japanese transistor. And the 2SC prefix just means it's NPN.
No, originally 2SA and 2SB meant germanium PNP and 2SC/2SD were silicon. Something went awry later on, all 2SA were germanium PNP, but2SB coulxd be either, but always PNP. 2SC are always NPN silicon. Usually 2 s d is also NPN silicon, but I think they lost the plot somewhere, because some 2SDs are PNP, 2SC284 is silicon without doubt. 0.7v forward on the junctions. They are amazing in that they compare very well to modern bipolar units.@@michaelturner4457
@@basimpsn negative-positive-negative, positive-negative-positive, cathod ray tube.
When I was in medical school doing physics class, I used a slide ruler and logarithm tables. For sixty students, we had one calculator.
That was in 1972. Today, my son is doing his post-doc using the Stanford University mainframe through his 2014 MacBook pro Terminal for calculations in quantum chemistry.
How's that for a generation gap? We still both love Jimi Hendrix.
MorbidManMusic no, his son can concentrate on more complex problems because the basic ones are handled automatically, muppet.
What about the knowledge of soul and God?
@@Crazytesseract You can always pick any of Alah, Jehovah, Buddha, Krishna, Odin, etc. It's a free country.
@@deadby15 If you think deeply there can be only one God, no more no less. However, God's names can be limitless, because of unlimited attributes. And God is a Person.
I bought a Battery Calculator with a Green LED Display at the Orlando Navy Exchange in April 1976 when I was just starting Basic Electricity and Electronics, BEE in the Navy. Retired in 1995 and worked for Sony for 8 years. Enjoyed all 3 videos.
Couldn't have been green LEDs back then. Most likely green/blue phosphor flourescent display. I had several myself with that sort of display.
I got my first electronic calculator while in 7th grade from a local store for $2.99USD with a coupon, a Casio watch with a built-in calculator that is, 1981. I was so happy wearing it while riding my bike home, and can’t wait to show mom and dad!
I love how I’m watching a historical documentary that is also a snapshot in history itself ❤. Loving the Vice President of Sharps office decor.
1961 Anita Mk8 16:56
1964 Sharp CS-10A 13:02
1969 Sharp QT-8D 25:18
1971 Busicom LE-120A 26:56
1972 Casio MINI 30:56
1973 Sharp EL-805 34:08
1979 Canon LC-7 34:26
Antes da década de 70 dizem que o homem já estava pisando na lua , saindo de lá e retornando em segurança para a terra, enquanto aqui estávamos engatinhando tentando aprimorar a calculadora.
I serviced many of these made by Toshiba and Hitachi and branded as Singer. The technology was advancing so rapidly that I was on new models about every six months! This required mastery of the dual trace oscilloscope. CRTs, nixie tubes then leds.
I paid a week's salary for a Ti 10 in 1973. None of my classmates in college at the time had a calculator. Computing orbits was really hard just using a pencil. Square roots were too. Wish I still had it.
Ebay has one!!
Thanks a lot for posting this wonderful series.
Just a little trivia. The actor (Toshiyuki Nishidain) in the advert at 34:21 played pigsy in Monkey (Magic) tv series.
The Aleph Zero 101 used a magnetic logic device known as a Parametron, developed by Eiichi Goto at the University of Tokyo and later commercialised by TDK. A Parametron based computer, the PC-1, was also built at the University. Although superseded by advances in transistor technology, a variant of the Parametron using superconducting Josephson junctions, also developed by Eiichi Goto, is the basis for the logic elements of many of today's laboratory quantum computers.
douro20 Wow! Didn’t knew about the Parametron. Thanks for those details.
"quantum" computers. Fixed for you.
Despite rivalry in WW2, US & Japan firms worked together in this industry. Without this, technology came to this forward today. Great documentary.
In college I used a Hewlett Packard HP21. It had an LED display and utilized RPN Logic. 50 years later, I still use it. It is slower than today's calculator but is easier and faster to use because of the RPN logic.
Still using my HP15C.
@@cjay2 don't reply to the bots ignore them. You will just encourage them. People don't talk like this... it was slower but faster?
Had the same
@@codyjamesp218Such a critic. If you never used Reverse Polish logic like the old HPs they saved entry steps.
I remember in 1976 I got my first pocket calculator, a little bigger/thicker than a pack of cigarettes, with red led display. I was in high school. And yes, we all did the "BOOBS" joke on our calculators, LOL 😝
The next year I got a TI programmable calculator, and imagined that the future was in computing.
Later that same year, I built my first computer from a kit.
When I graduated from HS, I went straight into electronics carrier, in the Bay Area, California.
Now I am retired, and living my dream being a musician, and playing with all kinds of fun electronic toys Computers, iPad, synthesizers, etc.
This video, brings back great memories, and had me pulling out my original HP 11C, from the 1970s 🙂
What a neat series, thank you for putting it up. I started in the computer industry repairing Canon nixie tube discrete calculators, I only wish I had kept one of the service manuals.
I still have CASIO FX-450 from 1986 (model first produced in 83). It's solar, and still works, almost 40 years later.
mind-blowing how technology transforms within a short time
Very interesting how it ranges into global connections and the social connections of engineers.
Awesome! I always took calculators for granted. I had no idea what was the story behind the development. I didn't know any of this took place.
I'm about midway through Chris Miller's book Chip War and I found this doco to be a really interesting aside to that, particularly when IC's enter the picture.
This is a really interesting series of videos - Thanks for posting them! I well remember as a teenager tinkering with various projects building amplifiers, radios, burglar alarms and so on - Fascinating!
Japan in this era was cutting edge in technological innovation!
it makes it look cool gritty and retro comming from a VCR tape its neat that its got a gritty tracking part at the start of the video
Thank you, RC286, for posting this video!
Sadly, it seems the producers didn't have anyone with technical knowledge check the writing and narration for errors.
Errata:
25:12 Sharp Micro Compet QT-8D, not "9T-8D"
27:45 "with polyvinyl chloride wires" should have been "with polyvinyl chloride insulated wires"
I’m so into vintage Japanese future tech.
Japan's path to become the most advanced country in the world is inspiring.....
My Dad was in charge of Quality Control and Customer Satisfaction at an computer building company named EAI (Electronic Associates Incorporated) in Long Branch, New Jersey between 1948 and 1968.
All the gamers talking about the need for more powerful CPUs and GPUs should watch this video, how much R&D, how much sweat was shed in development of the calculator the stepping stone to computers
I visited the Akihabara district in Tokyo (shown at the 16 minute mark) in 1998. As a nerd, who at the time owned a HP 100LX palmtop computer and HP48S calculator, I was in heaven. This was a great video, IMHO.
26:30. Am I now proud to still own such a LC-8 device from sharp ? It still works. I love these green scribbly-looking numbers and the way how the keyboard clicks are sounding. But it is pretty heavy for being just a simple calculator.
Ah, that good 'ol square analog TV format and VHS recording hiccups. Dark times, but good times. Interesting watch, thanks for upload.
TheCaptain008 that’s why I like my Sony, where I can change the aspect ratio so easily.
My favorite calculator was a Casio talking clock calculator that I bought in Saudi Arabia in 1978. It came in handy at nights I did not have to turn on the light and look for my glasses to check time. I am unable to find a replacement after it died of old age.
Odouls77 Just ask Siri
Several Nokia feature phones have a talking clock with a dedicated short-press or long-press button.
12:50 The engineers suffered from heart problems while enviro testing calculators? That's some dedication right there.
Dedication? Or fear of not producing?,
and being taken behind the lab and flogged at that time.
That's dumb, they could have built a double room, one cooled, the other where the calculators were and used gloves in walls like they do in bio-hazard laboratory's.
The heart problems could also have been due to overwork, so, going to and fro between very hot and cold must have contributed to the symptoms manifesting themselves. I don't know if overwork was an issue back then.
Extremely informative and interesting documentary!
Thanks for uploading it on UA-cam.
I want a Casio relay calculator after seeing this, very cool piece of vintage kit. Goes along with my 80s Casio keyboard and my 90s Casio G-Shock watch.
I still wear my 90's G-Shock. Works flawlessly.
This was so interesting. Can’t believe how driven and hard working these engineers were.
did not expect watch a documentary on calculators today
12:40 WOW. Forget placing a "Made in Japan" sticker on it. Every calculator should come with a signed letter by the R&D team saying "Made with the aweat and blood of the following engineers..."
My first glimpse of the desktop calculators was around 1973-75 in high school. Our mathematics lab had an array of those big clunky electronic calculators that did not much more than A/S/M/D and maybe a percentage or square root. The digital display was the weird individual numbers formed by wires that glowed like a light bulb. During lunch break we would hang out in the lab and play with the calculators - not having any real problems to solve - just watching the lights and displays change. I did learn to program one of the machines - that took IBM punch cards - to solve a quadratic equation. It was also connected to a 2d plotter that could draw graphs. That was my first exposure to programming. The lab also had a classic Teletype keyboard that communicated to a University computer about 150 miles away. We spent a lot of time on that playing Football with the computer.
Glowing display - nixie tubes.
This just shows how new all this technology is and that we have no idea how social media will effect society. I suspect institutions and contracts will become more under attack as people dumb themselves down.
💯💯💯
I'm 47 years old tomorrow (funnily enough) and, of course the Casio calculator I bought when I was 12 is still functioning perfectly.
The Casio calculator which you buy today won't last five to six years. Planned obsolecence? The HL-815 calculator I bought in 2016 failed within 3 years (made in Philippines).
24:12 boy was pulling off “solly me no speak engrish” like a pro
I remember back in the late 60's, I purchased a new HP-35 Calculator for use in university ($500) only to find out a month later, that an electronics parts vendor was having a promotion by Texas Instruments, by giving away a new calculator with a $10 purchase! The TI calculator was USA made. Still have the HP-35, and BTW, the circuit board is plated in GOLD, not solder! No wonder it is still operational.
My 1st calculator in high school in 1974 was the HP-21, which fit in a shirt pocket ($125). The nerds in school carried their calculators in a zip-pouch that hung from their pants belt. One internal rivalry between nerds was over the ownership of HP vs. TI . The super-nerds had the expensive programmable models. I still have my HP-21, but a roommate fried it by improperly unplugging it from the AC power. The stack memory paradigm in the HP's was sort of off-putting to the average non-computer-geek, but it had it's advantages.
I used an HP21 in college and still do to this day. There are so many advantages to the RPN logic and stack. I used to carry it using the belt loop as did many where I went to school.
I used a Ti 'Programmer' which among many other functions converted between binary/decimal/octal/hexadecimal. What a great tool when programming.
Very interesting documentary, amazing how fast things change while being of such huge complexity
They were fairly expensive in 1972. My little brother got one for Christmas.
the busicom 161 use an italian devloped memory device, COOL !
As a calculator collector... This video made me very very happy... and very very jealous of that HOARD!!! :D
do you have a website or something where I could see your collection..?
I've been VERY slowly working toward updating my ANCIENT site to have exactly that, but sadly, no, I don't have an actual page up. What I do have though is a browsable directory, with a number of pictures.
richfiles.solarbotics.net/calc/
I also have most of my pocket/handheld models packed up. Another project of mine will be to get those photographed and on display as well.
That's an awesome collection.. Mr.
I can help you rebuild your website....
In 1994 one of friends brother bought calculator from USA which was running on solar power and capable of draw graph of input f(x)=x+y or any complex function. Then it was capable of doing dy/dx integration
Thanks again for posting this series.... quite interesting... even in spite of the adult fairytale mixed in.
Waitaminute... 17:53 - did Busicom 161 used the magnetic rings as its memory? In 1966 Apollo program used those for moon flights in its navigation computers. They literally used space technologies before they went into space.
Magnetic core memory was pretty standard at the time. (That's where the word "core" in phrases like "core dump" comes from.) The "cool tech" in the Apollo computers was mostly about the ROM weaving and space-saving folding techniques; most core memory was kept on frames.
@@stanrogers5613 AFAIK, ROM-weaving was needed, as the computer ROM and hardware were required to withstand radiation, lightning, temperature extremes, and probably more.
Great upload ,amazing that 50+ years ago Japan gets a very fast railway and in Britain now we still have Thomas the Tank Engine................🚂
The UK has high-speed rail, too, though not everywhere. Coal- and steam-powered locomotives are a thing in the UK, and can provide backup during extreme weather, when electric trains are unable to function.
I would really love to find the schematics for the Sony SOBAX 600E from the 50s. I think.
Everything lights up. And I can get the Nixies to Rolling Display Test function. However the number key inputs have no functionality. I separated the chassis to look further but all these orange “Chiplet ICCs”
I can’t find anything on them or any documents to help me troubleshoot them.
Amazing how you can now readily get a basic calculator at the 99 cent store and it costs far less to produce for the manufacturer.
Hell, I can buy a calculator for 50p
I still have the HP41CX. Friends were using Sharp and TI which were very good at the time, have much softer keys, but not quite programmable. The question I have is why Japan has been lagging behind in Hitech in general ? Not only behind the US but China. Lack of innovation, resources, management, geopolitics, population, the lanaguage, or investment ? In what percentage each ?
I still owe and use regularly my Casio FX85 from 1985 ...
I genuinely enjoyed this 👍
Very interesting. Thank you for uploading.
please put link to previous video. it makes it easier to find the starting point.
It's interesting that the invention of the microprocessor has to do with the fact that Intel wanted to lower the production cost of they calculators by having a VLSI chips that is programmable.
I love this kind of videos.
Japan should build a calculator that is also a sattelite cellphone !
This is fantastic, thanks for sharing!
I still use a ti-59 in the shop. And a Ti-2500 on occasion
At 1:25 I saw my 40 years old calculator with solar cell. And it is still working!
Now they can he purchased at Dollar Tree for $1.25. Back in the 70s I saved my allowance to buy a 6 digit Commadore at The Treasury for $25. It was so cool.
I still remember my 1st calculator way back when. It was a Casio with the fluorescent display and cost, then, $125 on sale! LOL And it was basic. Just add, subtract, multiply, divide.
The last calculator I bought to just keep in the car, I bought for a whole, $4.00 (I think it was) and has scientific functions. The stupid thing actually works! LOL
Great. Thanks for this amazing story. May be the new generation can't evaluate it properly. I remember that i have seen electronic calculator first time in 1977 when i was 6yesrs old. It was soviet pocket calculator. I was shocked its possibilities. Later i had a texas instruments calculator made in japan. It had statistical functions so i was almost king of math in my class :)))). It's interesting but it works nowadays. Also my friend had Japan super thin calculator with solar panel which can be placed into notebook between paper sheets. It could perform only simple operations but seems like a extraterrestrial thing.
I can only imagine the level of corporate espionage that went on in those days. Billions at stake, the pressure.
20:50
You mean my calculator might have quit working because someone didn’t wash the pee off their hands?
Still got my school SHARP since the 90s.
❤️ 80s and 90s Japanese tech
interesting video i like the synth music 🎶 and the lowfi Bad Recording at the begening of the video😎
when I went to school, we were required to use the slide rule.
And then the last year we were required to buy a calculator which cost $85 and weighs as much as a brick
I used a slide rule, some kids used calculators, whose batteries died during exams. I never had that problem.
Who is Barry?
I still have and can use a slide rule. Sometimes I pull it out at work, just to get a reaction.
The are Barrys that we can trust.
My first simple calculator cost me $80.00 back in 1976. Cost today $4.00
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. agreed Wednesday to buy control of financially struggling Sharp Corp. for ¥389 billion ($3.5 billion) in the first takeover of a major Japanese electronics producer by a foreign company. The agreement by Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn,
more of this please
This is fucking mind blowing,am meanhighly automated factory machines,advancements in calculators,the birth of the micro processor,a man toutched the moon in 1969, that's incredible.
Fantastic!
I love tech new and especially old tech. The smell, the look, the function...NOICHE! lol
これらの電卓のいずれかを使用するよりも、伝統的な日本のそろばんが好まれます。
Bloody fascinating.
Labai įdomi elektronikos istorija ;)
Although these series of videos provide invaluable content for the history of science, the editing is terrible and the chronology of events is a big mess. You certainly need to watch it all over again or rewind several times to put it all firmly back in place. Anyway, it's a pleasure to watch and then meditate about technology and the rapid flow of scientific and technical progress not to mention the power of randomness and serendipity driving lots of fundamental breakthroughs.
I have a Melcor handheld calculator from the early 70s
25:51, a Protoplasmic energy field beyond comprehension.
The way I heard it Apollo didn't trust the computer they managed to get together, and had some back up tech, like sextants. I think it may have been more useful for the lander as it was used though. And it had a non critical error from someone setting it up wrong.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) worked very well, was highly dependable, had lots of firsts, and had plenty of advanced functionality not found for several decades in modern operating systems.
During the mission of Apollo 11, the computer received junk data from a misbehaving sensor unit, which the computer couldn't handle properly, but was wisely designed to disregard this data on operator command.
The Apollo Guidance Computer used some of the components that were later made for Japanese calculators.
this was an expensive lesson in global manufacturing capability. Faster, Cheaper, Better. You need to go from idea to production while making a profit in about 6 months or you'll be crushed.
Good video, indeed one day google will pluck the muffin. Check closed captions at around 25:15 🙂
Great!!!
We have to thank the Japanese calculator industry for the microprocessor - Busycalc (?) Edit..Busicom oops haha...as I continue watching...ordered an LSI chip from semiconductor memory makers Intel in the late 60s. Seeing how complex the Japanese engineers had envisioned their chip Ted Hoff suggested that they use a programmable general purpose logic device. The 4004 was born. The rest is history of course.
I still have that model Casio shown at 31:48, and I still use it.