During the communist era, pocket calculators were produced by two companies – Wroclaw’s Elwro and Bydgoszcz’s Unitra Eltra. We will take a look at the constructions made in Upper Silesia at another time, today’s hero will be a somewhat strange and already forgotten construction from the Brda River.
Since its inception, all digital machines were meant to serve man and help him perform his daily tasks in the office, on the factory floor or at home. However, in order for a machine to be useful, something was needed so that humans could understand it. Nowadays, it is quite normal to have all kinds of screens on which digital systems display information that we can understand, but this was not always the case.
There are cases in which a manufacturer releases a device that is already obsolete on the day of its release, lacking modern solutions. An example of such equipment may be the Soviet calculator Электроника MK-33 (Elektronika MK-33), but are you sure?
In the early 1970s, engineers from the Leningrad Electronic Instrumentation Association “Svetlana” (Светлана) began work on the next calculator, the Электроника C3-07 (Elektronika C3-07). This device was a rather simple design with only fifteen keys, meaning that some functions had to be assigned to the same button. Such a solution was quite problematic, more than once there were mistakes, and also just typing in the right sequence took quite a long time. In the successor to the C3-07, the designers had to eliminate these inconveniences.
A little bit of calculators were produced in socialist Poland. There were models dedicated to the ordinary Kowalski, scientific designs for professors, printing for accountants or pocket calculators for school children. The basic and probably one of the most popular models was the Elwro 144, a classic base design, on which quite a few other calculators produced by the Elwro plant in Wroclaw were based. Today I would like to tell you about the latest evolution of the 144 model, the Elwro 151 calculator.
My site has already featured material about calculators from the USSR and Japan, but I have never prepared a description of a device from Bulgaria. It’s time to change that.
Recently, there has already been one calculator coming from Japan, and that was the Canon Canola L100A. Today it’s time for another design from that part of the world, the SHARP EL-8116.
In the early 1970s, the Japanese company CANON mainly produced professional office calculators. Their quality was really high, after all, at that time the Japanese specialized primarily in industrial equipment, whose workmanship is by definition better compared to consumer devices.
