Friden Calculating Machine Company (Friden, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of typewriters and mechanical, later electronic calculators. It was founded by

Carl Friden Carl Friden (April 11, 1891 – April 29, 1945) was a Swedish-born, American mechanical engineer and businessman who founded the Friden Calculating Machine Company ( Friden, Inc.). Background Carl Mauritz Fredrik Friden was born in Alvesta in Kr ...

San Leandro, California San Leandro ( Spanish for " St. Leander") is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. It is located in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area; between Oakland to the northwest, and Ashland, Castro Valley, and Hayward to the s ...

, in 1934.

History

In 1957, Friden purchased the Commercial Controls Corporation of

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...

. This gave them the Flexowriter teleprinter, an electric typewriter capable of being used as part of

unit record equipment Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, well before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using electromechanical machines collectively referred to as unit record equipment, electric accounting machines (EAM) or ...

developed in World War II for the Department of the Navy to automatically type "regret to inform you" letters to the survivors of fallen servicemen, the predecessor to modern computers. The Flexowriter could be attached to Friden calculators and driven by

paper tape Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage ...

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 upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch ...

ized desktop electronic calculator, the model EC-130 in June 1963, designed by Robert "Bob" Appleby Ragen. This machine had a 13-digit capacity and a 5-inch CRT display. It used a magnetostrictive

delay-line memory Delay-line memory is a form of computer memory, now obsolete, that was used on some of the earliest digital computers. Like many modern forms of electronic computer memory, delay-line memory was a refreshable memory, but as opposed to modern ran ...

, to save money on expensive transistors. The EC-130 sold for $2,200 (), or about three times the price of comparable electromechanical calculators of the time. It was the first calculator to use

reverse Polish notation Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators ''follow'' their operands, in contrast to Polish notation (PN), in wh ...

(RPN), which eliminated the need for

parentheses A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

to specify the

order of operations In mathematics and computer programming, the order of operations (or operator precedence) is a collection of rules that reflect conventions about which procedures to perform first in order to evaluate a given mathematical expression. For examp ...

in complex calculations. The successor model EC-132, introduced in April 1965, added a square root function. In 1965 the company was purchased by the

Singer Corporation Singer Corporation is an American manufacturer of consumer sewing machines, first established as I. M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac Singer, Isaac M. Singer with New York lawyer Edward Cabot Clark, Edward C. Clark. Best known for its sewing mac ...

, but continued operation under the Friden brand name until 1974. The Singer – Friden Research Center in Oakland, California, later moved to Palo Alto, California (1965 to 1970), was unable to develop a pocket-sized calculator to compete with the corresponding new Japanese products, such as the

Busicom was a Japanese company that manufactured and sold computer-related products headquartered in Taito, Tokyo. It owned the rights to Intel's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which they created in partnership with Intel in 1970. Busicom ask ...

, based on

Intel 4004 The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. Sold for US$60, it was the first commercially produced microprocessor, and the first in a long line of Intel CPUs. The 4004 was the first significa ...

in 1971, Casio Mini and Sharp EL-805 in 1972.

References

External links

{{commons category, Friden
Friden tribute web site (archived 2019)
Electromechanical calculator sold from 1949 to 1966
Friden Flexowriter
combination typewriter and

punch, designed by IBM during the 1940s and bought out by Friden in the late 1950s (Retrieved April 10, 2007)
Friden EC-130
Electronic calculator (1963)

Electronic calculator (1965)

Electronic printing calculator with DTL logic
Singer/Friden 1162
Electronic calculator with DTL logic and CRT display
Friden/Singer 1112
with 507 transistors and twelve digit

Nixie tube A Nixie tube ( ), or cold cathode display, is an electronic device used for displaying numerals or other information using glow discharge. The glass tube contains a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes, shaped like numerals or other symbo ...

display, designed and built by

Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo G ...

Mechanical calculator companies Electromechanical calculator companies Electronic calculator companies Companies based in San Leandro, California Manufacturing companies disestablished in 1974 Manufacturing companies established in 1934 1934 establishments in California 1974 disestablishments in California American companies disestablished in 1974

History

References

Further reading

External links