Let’s see what happens…

At the end of the 1950s the Comptometer Corporation (formerly Felt & Tarrant) was not doing well financially. They desperately needed a hit product, and came up with the Electrowriter. Two machines connected by a phone line, like a fax machines, but you could transmit live writing and drawing. (1/2)

Awesome 1936 ad for the Brunsviga mechanical calculator, which apparently was used aboard the Hindenburg zeppelin to calculate its course. The vessel flew for only 14 months till its disastrous crash in May 1937.

The Felt & Tarrant company made the Comptometer, a type of mechanical calculator that was in production from 1889 till about 1960. In the 1950s they tried to expand to other products. Here is an advert for their dictation machine. It was given the manly name, the "Comptometer Commander. (1/3)

what monster did this????

“Are machines smarter than me?” This 1949 ad for the Comptometer mechanical calculator discusses the question we are still struggling with now, and comes to the conclusion that grey matter beats any new-fangled machine.

My latest buy. I hope I can get this very heavy bit of machinery to work again.

The ZX81/80 Print ‘N’ Plotter was a semi-transparent sheet that allowed you to trace pictures with pencil and pixelize them so that they can be approximately displayed on the Sinclair ZX81’s screen of 22x32 characters or 44x64 pixels. The sheet can be washed clean.

New video: I went to see the Pascaline! They did not let me touch it. youtu.be/CROrLQpN6dc

Recently I bought this toy calculator from 1971. It is quite clever how its 2-digit register is shown not just as digits but also with columns of coloured dots.

On an auction site someone is claiming to have a Comptometer for sale, but the picture is some kind of AI-generated rubbish. I don't see the point, but it makes for a fun game: How many errors can you spot?

This little guy is the Facit Wizard. It is the advertising mascot for the Facit mechanical calculators. His first appearance was in the 1950s. 1/3

Today I opened a box from my storage unit and pulled out six Contex B adding machines. These were in production from 1951 till about 1970.

Picket Right, a font that's only 2px wide Pixel art done by trampolinebears at r/PixelArt. #pixelart #pixel #art #indiedev

I went to a large car boot sale today and found several calculators. Here are some pictures. I only bought the Odhner in the last picture, since I already had the others in my collection.

It's been a while since my last calculator collection update, and this time it's not even a calculator.

Yet again Stephen Freeborn shows off some amazingly weird early adding machine youtube.com/watch?v=8tvE...

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

I’d never heard of chisanbop, but it was a pleasure to watch this feature-length documentary in one sitting. A fascinating and well-told story of a forgotten subject.

When a regular hexagon tiles the plane, each tile has 6 neighbours. In other tilings by a convex monotile, you can have more neighbours on some tiles by having others with less. The red tiles here have 8 neighbours. There is no upper bound, as you can simply use narrower strips to get more... (1/2)

Here are some pictures I just took of a small barred grass snake in the fish pond in the back garden.

Now it's time for a video about an adding listing machine, the Dixi. It is basically the same as an Addo-X, just painted brown and with a Dalton-style keyboard layout. This one is a model A from the 1940s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5YB...

The latest addition to my calculator collection is an early Britannic, made by Guy's Calculating Machines Ltd in about 1930. This was the only pinwheel machine made in Britain. It started small, with only 2000 units made in the first 15 years, of which this is one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwqE...

I've been working on another old mechanical calculator and had some trouble reading the serial number on the back. I wonder if it was the last one done before the weekend, or the first one the Monday morning after.

Here's the video of my wood Comptometer, a mechanical calculator from about 1902. youtu.be/cXQF6svDqKU

I've been fixing up this lovely old mechanical calculator, a wooden Comptometer made in about 1902. Tomorrow I'll put it on my website and post a video.

My latest calculator video is a short one about another Multo model 3. As with nearly every Multo you find, it was completely seized up from dried oil when I got it, so it took a lot of effort to get it running again. youtu.be/JgRDggPHek0

I bought this booklet just for the one hilarious photo. It is a report on the testing of a "vaudeville telepathist". Josef Kraus was a Czech who took the stage name (Frederick) Marion, and one of his tricks was to have someone hide an object, then he would hold their hand and find it. (1/2)

Poor little useless switch

A beautiful morning 18 months ago

Here is a nice tiling pattern found in the wild. It is a photo I took in 2023 of a partitioning screen inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

The ads for science toys in the 1930s were awesome. Case in point: The Radium Spinthariscope. "Witness The Destruction Of Thousands Of Worlds" I'd buy that for a dollar.

I scanned an Italian instruction book for the Comptometer calculator from 1916. I love old photos like this one showing a man using the calculator. It is cut out like a silhouette to make the background white. This seems primitive, but they cut very detailed holes above and below his right hand.

The partial solar eclipse is underway, and here I made it visible by using two sheets of paper, one with a pinhole to project it onto the other. Max of this eclipse is about 36% covered in 25 minutes (12:10).

Here are two new videos about some Addiators, which are simple adding machines. The first is an early one from the 1920s or 1930s: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oyd...

Happy Pi day! Pi ~ 355/113 : www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9_n...

Absolutely howling at the last shot of this.

Random physics thought: If a horse gallops past you, however fast it is going its hoofbeats are not subject to the Doppler effect. (1/3)

The story of how Mark and Dave brought a COW back to BBC Wales. vimeo.com/1056578810

This is great!

I went to a small meetup of mechanical calculator collectors yesterday in Antwerp. Had a lovely day - some lectures, lunch, meeting other collectors, looking at their machines, and showing off some of my own. It was also the last opportunity to see the calculator exhibition at the university there.

I’ve drawn one of my favourite hexagons (freehand, pen). It is the outline of what you get when you stick equilateral triangles on two adjacent sides of a square. This hexagon looks a bit like a shield, and tiles the plane in many nice ways.

I've just found the best hack. Swear in your search request. It's a great way to bypass the AI summary and make your search history look like you're chronically pissed off at everything!

Yes, we should. #math

Here’s one of my favourite photos that I took. It’s of a toad on a log in a pond. His ridiculous macho stance amuses me

This logo for a food company (Johma) is supposed to look like the outline of a person's head wearing a tall chef's hat. When turned sideways.... BTW, they stopped using this logo, but it was in use for many years.

Just saw this very impressive build of a Thomas-style Arithmometer. A stepped drum machine hand-made out of wood, with some springs and metal shafts. With some great reflections at the end- excellent work Will! youtu.be/E0pJST5mL3A?...

It's Christmas, so it's time for It's a Wonderful Life. My eye can't help but be drawn to all the mechanical calculators and cash registers. (Burrroughs class 1 and class 3 adding machines, National cash register)

On the Internet Archive there are many computing magazines from the 1980s, he heyday of the microcomputer. I had the Sinclair ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum. Let me tell you of a nice example of bootstrapping....