EEVblog
Вставка
- Опубліковано 6 гру 2018
- Let's do some programming, early 1970's style with a teardown of the Canon Canola SX-100 Programmable Calculator
Forum: www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eev...
EEVblog Main Web Site: www.eevblog.com
The 2nd EEVblog Channel: / eevblog2
Support the EEVblog through Patreon!
/ eevblog
AliExpress Affiliate: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/c2LRpe8g
Buy anything through that link and Dave gets a commission at no cost to you.
Stuff I recommend:
kit.com/EEVblog/
Donate With Bitcoin & Other Crypto Currencies!
www.eevblog.com/crypto-currency/
T-Shirts: teespring.com/stores/eevblog
Likecoin - Coins for Likes: likecoin.pro/@eevblog/dil9/hcq3 - Наука та технологія
I worked on these in 70s in Canada. The SX310 used mag card storage for programs, the SX320 used data cartridge. The 310 was the cheap version, the 320 the deluxe. They were not around very long. They were replaced by the AX-1 which used the same programming language and the BX-1 that used BASIC. I think there was even a floppy drive system available for the SX320.
Great video a nice trip down memory lane. Thanks.
Here in the US I worked with the SX series in my first job out of high school. I learned 6800 assembly on the AX-1/BX-1. I'm currently working with a guy in Portugal who has a BX-1 that mostly works. Printing on 30+ year old thermal paper looked good. We just got it to save programs to a hardware floppy disk emulator!
Ahh, I see you sprung for the Cockford-Ollie voice activated focus module. Good stuff.
i don't think so, dave's much too professional and white collar to be into a lowly working man's channel
Focus you fack!
Came to comment on AvE focus. See I am not the first.
My pop became an accountant in the 60s and only retired some five years ago. He used maybe 2 (3?) Canon adding machines all the way through. (He wore at least one out, as I recall.) The keys were dependable and had snappy rebound and the printers were pretty much indestructible. He would not switch for anything else. What we look at today as sloppy or bodgy was very much dependable at the time, and these large desktop-format Canon calculators were tool of choice for anyone that banged out numbers all day. I'll note that yours fired up just fine, which I found very pleasing indeed. Great teardown!
I was thinking of building one with Cherry MX Brown mechanical keys.
@@eggaweb Cherry MX Blues is where it's at.
I used this programmable calculator to determine the size of the timbers and nail plates for house roof trusses in the mid 70's. It was provided and programmed by Pryda (New Zealand). Pryda manufactured the Gang Nail plates used in construction of timber roof trusses. It provided all the cutting list and angles for the timber cord and web components and each gang nail plate size at every join. It worked for all spans and roof and ceiling loadings (Concrete Tiles, Roofing Sheets and Plaster). Over time I learnt how to modify existing programs which was essentially an early form of the Basic programming language with up to about a thousand lines of code. This machine was the catalyst to my computer analyst career.
Note that some of the "bodge" wires have dashed-line silk-screen, so not entirely bodged.
Some of the extra wiring looks as though it was added to reduce the resistances of traces on the board, instead of relying on plated-through holes to carry current from one side of the board to the other. This is important, as you don't know for certain just how thick the metal layer is. Still, they could always have just soldered pins into each of the through-holes, and the pins would have carried the lion's share of the current .....
Getting PCBs made was a slower and more expensive process in the 1970s! If you made a mistake, you would not just scrap the boards; you would modify the ones you had and alter the artwork in time for the next batch.
1980s mini-computers were often full of "bodge wires". They still worked well enough to be useful for designing the next generation of microcomputers .....
Yes. You got the date right. My Dad was an accountant and got one of these brand new in 1976. It was great entertainment for us. He would spend five minutes entering codes and numbers, then it would finally print out my name.
I should add that the purchase price was NZ$4000.00 !!!!!!
These were not office machines or personal calculators. I used to see these and others like this from names like HP and Tektronix when they were used in scientific and industry to run experiments, test equipment or some process machine like a low cost PLC of the day. What you are missing from that back panel is the I/O connectors, I expect everyone who bought one of these had a special cable that they made up to connect to the hardware they were automating.
PLC?
@@squatchhammer7215 Yep. It's a mini plc or Arduino of its day.
@@squatchhammer7215 Programmable Logic Controller :)
Back in the day, I tore apart an early 70s or maybe late 60s video terminal. The entire character set was formed by a board sized array of individual diodes. The screen memory was a huge delay line coiled up in a metal box.
Jim Steele Boise
@@krazykarl0 I think they were made by Conrac... at least that's what we called them... in polite company. :-)
REMINDER TO DAVE: The ROM based state machine sounds interesting, do a video on it ;-)
To give a little teaser. It is a complete not simplified Karnaugh map. So it is input mapped to output without the simplification. Which if you don't have cplds or fpgas (and they didn't back then) is the next best thing.
That sounds like something Ben Eater would do. He made a 7-segment decoder with an EPROM in his video named "Using an EEPROM to replace combinational logic".
ua-cam.com/video/BA12Z7gQ4P0/v-deo.html
@@dentakuweb interesting video. It just doesn't write it as a sum of products, and use that as the memory for ORing and ANDing.
We used HP98000 series "calculators" at school. In the later 1970s, HP brought out the HP 95/97 desktop calculators. The HP97 was the desktop version of the HP67. Programs, and the magnetic strips, could go between the two interchangeably. The HP97 did have a built in thermal printer. The HP 9800 series higher end "calculators" were extremely capable, being able to be used as GPIB controllers, and a couple of the models could do linear algebra.
Thank goodness they developed the pocket calculator relatively quickly because the pants with pockets that were tailored to hold that thing weren't very stylish.
that is actually a lovely bit of gear
A Joy Forever, brings a teat to tied eyes! I love the craftsmanship.
When you set that on your desk, you don't have to worry about it moving...
Both
At 10KG, that ain't going anywhere.
Bet you I'd still manage to lose it!
Imagine being in college in the 70's and showing up to an exam with that bad boy.
Those kids would have a HARD time trying to smuggle one of those calculator during the surprise math exam. ;)
Great teardown. Thanks!
... My dad still uses his.
Edit:
To expand on this, he uses the SX300, (and still has spares for parts) he was an accountant, and being able to work with large numbers and have the written history of all the calculations was invaluable to him.
The information on the clear CPU feature is very interesting, as I remember him being very upset about that, as it took out 3 days worth of programming something.
I will check if he has a different manual for it to what you have.
> focus, you bastard
Heheh, we're all on a wavelength aren't we.
12:50 for those who hurry
It's slightly more advertiser friendly than AvE's line.
@@Anonymouspock I don't want to live in an advertiser friendly world!
The glare on the CRO almost looks like a waveform
The blue wires aren't bodges - they're marked on the silkscreen!
I reckon they added them to the silkscreen instead of redesigning the board, still a bodge really
its possibly so they could do discreet testing on the board, powering up a test area ???
This was the "first and only", machine in my years - 1970's at Wesley College in Perth WA, now I'm 57, what a blast from the past, hope it works!
The model number is called Canon Canola SX100. Canola today means a type of cooking oil and SX100 is a model of Canon PowerShot camera.
REMINDER TO DAVE: The ROM based state machine sounds interesting, do a video on it ;-) (bis)
yeah you are right. I love vintage calculators
Seriously a wonderful video topic, right up my street you bobby dazzler!
The multi-chip "microprocessor" is just the old fashioned mini-computer era way of making a CPU. The whole board is literally the central processing unit. Actual ~$100000 computers like the PDP-11 were built in the same way.
That looks similar to the Wang Numeric programmable that we had in computer lab in 1978. As I remember there were 4 of them in the classroom along with two Tandy TRS-80s for programming in MS-DOS and the main frame terminal that allowed us to execute FORTRAN and COBOL programs.
What a thing of beauty.
LOVE those freehand curves of the tracks!! No 0°, 45°, 90° 'rubbish' of the modern-day CAD! I'd love it if I could still design modern PCBs like that!! Solder mask?! Pfft Shoulder flask! ;) all that steel!! No wonder its heavy!! And then... Along came miniaturisation!
Thumbs up! What a beautiful calculator. And the thermal printer too.
I think that printer just needs some cleaning and lubrication and it will run fine again.
One of your more interesting teardowns. : - )))
I love hand drawn documentation, done by real draftsman. My father used to do it, and I started out doing it.
It's fun to find at my job to find the old drafting drawings.
I used one of these when I was a graduate student. They were unpopular in the lab and shortly replaced with Wang 700s.
Don't know about this one. Wang made pretty good stuff, competing head to head in word processing against IBM. We had a Wang VS mini with COBOL and Fortran some years after this 700. Too bad it went out of business.
That is NumberWang
My Wang is a little dodgy.
My mates and I used the SX-100 and another Canola 1614P for mathematics and physics in high school. c. 1974-75. I believe they were donated to NSW public schools by Canon.
Interesting machine!
Make sure you lubricate the gears with canola oil.
32:17
15 digit readout, now that's accuracy
OverUnity7734 Early Texas pocket scientific calculator had that too (rechargeable NiCd battery pack).
From before decoupling was invented by the look of it!!
Did the manual give any clue as to what the mystery chip was? (IC6270)
i found this service document.
www.wass.net/manuals/Canon%20SX-300%20Service.pdf
I love that display
My take on the blue wires with dashed line silkscreen markings was that there was no more room on the board layout for a given trace, so a jumper wire was necessary. Not a bodge, not an incomplete update.
I love old calculators. When I was a teenager back around 1971 I came across a box of circuit boards at the local electronics disposal store. Bought the lot for about $10 and discovered they were all the boards from a scientific desktop calculator, can't remember what brand it was. Bottom of the box had the case and keyboard and a wonderful 16 digit Nixie tube display board complete with tubes. I put it all together and it seemed to work except for a few weird faults. The boards were all diode logic with a few 14/16 pin DIP packages. The boards had hundreds (thousands?) of little glass diodes standing on end, soldered together on the top. After MANY hours messing around, I managed to get it working without fault. Turns out there were a few cracks on come circuit boards which when soldered fixed the problems. No idea why it was scrapped because the fault was not that hard to fix and a machine like that back in the early 70's would have been worth a small fortune. Soon after, I was falling behind in my high school exams and my dad tossed out (and sold to pawn brokers the more valuable items) all of my electronics parts and projects, including this calculator. I never forgave him for that!
My guess is the "tape reader/writer" uses a paper tape (or cards) with a magnetic stripe on the back, and the 24 column setting is for printing metadata on the front side.
I still have my TI30, TI58 and TI59. All in working order.
An HP rep brought one of the first production units to the Kansas state summer science honors camp when I was a freshman [9th grade] in 1970.
We wrote several programs that pushed it hard. By '75 these were pase' HP 65s and TI 41s were fully mag stripe programmable in your pocket. The only thing the desktops had by then was the printer.
Me: It's sexy. You, .3 seconds later: It's pretty sexy looking.
Dave just had Christmas arrive early.
My dad said they had one of these in one of his classrooms when he was a kid.
I guess you cant compare pocket calculators with this thing. It would be like comparing a tablet with a notebook, or or a notebook with a desktop. :)
Nice teardown!
There was a late 1960s machine that I learned to program on, called the Olivetti Programma 101. It only performed arithmatic functions plus square root as I recall. This machine is much more sophisticated.
A lovely machine.
Did you ever figure out what the IC 6270 was? Was it a delay line?
Bit-slice processor design?
Not in the rigorous sense. But some sort of "roll-your-own" processor, since it is programmable.
Calculators were often using 4-bit BCD internally, with numbers expressed in scientific notation; so it is probably implementating an ALU that works serially on 4-bit BCD "words".
externally your Canon Canola SX-100 resembles in GIGANTIC SIZE the HP-97, both programmable calculators.
Even after the advent of the pocket calculator most people in the business world still used adding machines. I am guessing if you were doing accounting of some sort you would find it easier to use that beast then a calc with a tiny screen. plus it does have the printer as you stated.
lesdmark indeed, my understanding was always that having a literal "paper trail" was a requirement in certain professions (accountants presumably).
This one was a few years before the scientific pocket calculator. This one was for engineering, science or economic cals. Don't need all that power for accounting, but why not if you have that on your desk.
This one was used for engineering work, and for people who had to do a lot of fast and complex computation.
That's about the same size as the HP-97 iirc. Pretty standard form factor for a deal calculator, and it probably cost about $300 or so in 1970s USDs. I had a TI-59 with the printer cradle, and that was a little bit smaller, but the print tape wasn't nearly as wide.
Neat! From the same period as the HP-90 or 9800 series I guess? Seems like a worthy competitor (save for not using RPN of course :D)
What would someone program with that? Does it support variables or what?
you store the value in named registres and recall those, afaik
With my HP 50G I simplified calculations by making a program of the grunt calculations. In exams it made it easier.
It's a (physically) big scientific calculator. You can store variables in the registers and pass values in and out of custom functions you write. These were handy for quick physics and engineering work, but in a format you could bang on all day.
I have a HP scientific calculator desktop from the same period. It could do most any basic scientific/ engineering problems. As for variables, you could input from the keyboard, use the random number function, generate lookup tables, increment numbers. etc.
@@kimchee94112, I can't readily think of any problem requiring a random number. Could you remind me of one?
I could see this being used in the physics lab component at a college in the 70's.
Awesome but almost certainly coincidental Dr Strangelove reference "OPE"
The roller on the magnetic (bar strip) strip card reader disintegrated exactly the same way the one did on my HP 9100B. Seems stuff just doesn't last for 50 years anymore ...
rubber doesnt last forever. It drys up and perishes. youll have to replace the roller.
Pretty much everything on these things should last forever except the rubber, really
I had to replace the belts and roller on my HP-85 as well, sadly the roller is still a huge pain though
Frankly, I'm disappointed the caps didn't eject off the PCB.
The Olivetti P101 was worth about $9000 in NZ in the early 70s. At that time a tech's wages were $80 a week.
Those "calcs" were intended to last, and the mag card readers allowed control data and transaction storage to ensure data integrity of the magnetic surface on the card. Pretty cool redundancy checking when there wasn't a full print of the transaction data.
The Canola looks much the same tech with its mag card reader.
dave, please dont get rid of the ESD mat, it looks so sexy on video
2:09 what is on the analog scope screen in the background?
Just the ceiling lights reflected off the screen surface I think. The camera has just caught it at an odd angle.
looks like the cash register the store that use to be open down the road had when i was 5 or 6
MITs Altair is introduced in January of 1975. The Altair used the 8080. Probably not available, when this unit was designed. So it was their own, "in-house" "processor" design.
CPM was better than DOS then. Gary Kildall, RIP.
I thought the name was 'cannoli' , awesome name. Did it sell well in Italy?
I have a Canon Card LC-32 pocket calculator.
Mike did a teardown on a thermal camera and they were using a ROM (EPROM I think) to create images on a display without a CPU. ua-cam.com/video/kBLp-8PzgMs/v-deo.html
18:58 Cristal !
Absolutely amazing! My brain hurts. I'm estimating it cost around $17,000.
No way. HP 9810, much mightier, much earlier, of much better build quality was $2500-$5000 in 1971. You can compare to SX100 data www.calcuseum.com/SCRAPBOOK/BONUS/72669/1.htm
That's a beast, non of this pocket rubbish. Don't need to write your name on that puppy.
Nice tour!
≈ 4m 10s: "And on the back of this beast, we've got a weird-ass mains connector ..." --- "mains" = main power??
Yes, that's a pretty common style; one I've seen lots of, I think even still today, mainly on printers. Why do you call it weird?
Now, keep in mind, I'm talking U.S. machines; which of course, this was.
Fred
you did not show the display board
Am I mistaken or is this full of Toshiba HD32xx and Texas Instruments branded 74Nxx
The chip closest to the processor I suspect is the memory controller. (HD3542) The chips have the same layout as an Intel 8088.
25:54 CATHOD !
cool old tank
13:51 punch cards/tape?
My guess is one major advantage it had over the HP-65 and the other pocket programmables coming on the market was *price*. Those pocket calculators were hugely expensive - around a thousand dollars - about 4600 in today's currency. I can't find any price specifics, but I bet the desktops were significantly cheaper.
Back in the old days they often used ROMs as FPGAs before FPGAs were a thing. In the 80s PALs and PLAs were the thing, then they were superseded by FPGAs.
Don't forget: a post "man on the moon" era calculator
Wow this thing did not last long, the casio fx-501p &502p programmable pocket calculators came in the late 70s and they can do way more than this one! Amazing ..
I think you're underestimating how cool it was to be a nerd back then. Having one of those on your desk was as much a status symbol as it was a functional tool.
Treddian Also, if you were a structural engineer, documenting every step of your calculations to the authorities was essential for both permits and liability. If it was used for that, there will still be people trusting their lives to those structures and the printouts sitting in public records to prove they were designed properly.
@@Treddian and harder to steal than a programmable pocket calculator!
Most important question should be: "Will it run Doom?"
yesssssssssssssssssssssss
more more
I wonder what'd happen if you fed that reader a paper fare card like a lot of US East Coast transit systems use. Bet it'd read and write just fine!
yay!
I am surprised it is fast. The program execution is slow, but this might be because the printer is enabled. The factorial, sin, cos, tan are very very fast. 4MHz is also pretty high clock, even if it is divided few times.
This 69! result was essentially instantenious. Even on modern calculators it can take seconds.
Its fast probably because everything is done in ROM or with 74 logic.
"focus you bastard"
taking video tips from AvE are we? :D
Channel recommended by a beautiful lady (Jeri Ellsworth)
Seems similar to the HP 9810A.
"all the good stuff is made in japan" and then crack it open to see a nightmare
That mental note is guaranteed goneskie
Interestingly, the clock inverters are 74LS
beopstek S or LS needed for the high clock frequency. Once divided down, regular TTL is fast enough. F is too finicky to use unnecessarily.
reminds me of a old school till, thats what i thought it was until i saw there was no cash desk thingy
rodney mckay Could be connected to the instrument I/O interface on the back if necessary!
@@johnfrancisdoe1563 thanks for that info
I don't like this set up 'prop' background. A genuine, neat lab storage shelf is way better.
You must be new here....
The HP 9100B puts this thing to shame. Programmed it in high school.
Dave looked like you were struggling to lift this. Being short was the problem, Muriel.
Isn't that power connector (4:15 onward) just C6, aka Mickey Mouse?
Yes
Anyone has an nice electronic comonent wiki to suggest?
What do you want exactly?
@@JGnLAU8OAWF6 like a wiki where you can look after all mikrocontrollers drivers &co
@@badacconosu just look at Digi-Key
and manufacturers sites.
@@JGnLAU8OAWF6 oh thanks! Why i never came onto this site? :D digi key is great thanks again