- Friden, Inc.
Friden Calculating Machine Company (Friden, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of typewriters and electronic calculators. It was founded by
Carl Friden inSan Leandro, California in 1934. Friden electromechanicalcalculator s were robust and popular.In 1957, Friden purchased the
Commercial Controls Corporation ofRochester, New York . This gave them theFlexowriter teleprinter, an electric typewriter capable of being used as part ofUnit record equipment , predecessor to modern computers. The Flexowriter could be attached to Friden calculators and driven bypaper tape to produce bills and other form letters which had names of customers and amounts of bills filled in automatically. Friden eventually expanded into production of a few models of early transistorized computers.Friden introduced the first fully
transistor ized desktop electronic calculator, the model EC-130 in June 1963. This machine had a 13-digit capacity and a 5-inchCRT display. It used a form ofacoustic delay line for memory, to save money on expensive transistors. The EC-130 sold for $2200, about three times the price of comparable electromechanical calculators of the time. It was the first calculator to usereverse Polish notation (RPN ), which eliminated the need for parentheses to specify theorder of operations in complex calculations. The successor model EC-132 added a square root function.In 1965 the company was purchased by the
Singer Corporation .External links
* [http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/fridenstw.html Friden STW-10] Electromechanical calculator sold from 1949–1966
* [http://blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/friden/ Friden Flexowriter] combination typewriter andpaper tape punch, designed by IBM during the 1940s and bought out by Friden in the late 1950s (RetrievedApril 10 ,2007 )
* [http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden130.html Friden EC-130] Electronic calculator (1963)
* [http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden132.html Friden EC-132] Electronic calculator (1965)
* [http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/fri1112.html Friden/Singer 1112] with 507 transistors and twelve digitNixie tube display, designed and built by Hitachi
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