Man Creates Huge Online Museum for Vintage Calculators
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Five hundred eighty-three calculators, 128 brands and one man who has painstakingly cataloged them all.
Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.
It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15, in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.
“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window,” says Dudek who runs the Vintage Technology site. “The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations.”
Dudek’s online catalog of calculators is an impressive archive of calculators from one decade. Each of the 583 calculators on the site have size, power, case, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. The models also include comments explaining the components used, construction and the logic used.
Ultimately, Dudek hopes to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators he estimates were made in the 1970s.
“What I thought really interesting is that it not just has calculator information but also chip numbers from some of the old ICs used in the device,” says Matt Stack, a calculator enthusiast who recently created a graphing calculator built on open source hardware. ” I like to consider myself an expert in calculators and I learned something.”
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