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Information about Comptometer

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1920 Comptometer
A Comptometer is a type of mechanical (or electro-mechanical) adding machine. The comptometer was the first adding device to be driven solely by the action of pressing keys, which are arranged in an array of vertical and horizontal columns.

"Comptometer" is a trade name of the Felt and Tarrant Manufacturing Company of Chicago (later the Comptometer Corporation, and then Victor Comptometer Corporation), and after 1961 was licensed to Sumlock-Comptometer of Great Britain. It is widely used as a generic name for the class of device. The original design was patented in 1887 by Dorr Felt, a U.S. citizen.

Although the comptometer was designed primarily for adding, it could also do division, multiplication and subtraction. Special comptometers with varying key arrays (with from 30 to well over 100 keys) were produced for a variety of purposes, including calculating currencies, time and Imperial measures of weight.

In the hands of a skilled operator, comptometers can add numbers very rapidly, since all the digits of a number can be entered simultaneously using as many fingers as required, making them much faster to use than electronic calculators. Consequently, in specialist applications they remained in use in limited numbers into the 1990s, but with the exception of a handful of machines, have now all been superseded by computer software.

See also

References

  • Darby E: "It all adds up: The growth of Victor Comptometer Corporation", Victor Comptometer Corporation, 1968.

External links

adding machine is a type of calculator, usually specialized for bookkeeping calculations. In the United States, very old adding machines were usually built to read in dollars and cents.

It was invented by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642.
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The ANITA Mark VII and ANITA Mark VIII calculators were launched simultaneously in late 1961 as the world's first all-electronic desktop calculators. Designed and built by the Bell Punch Co.
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Dorr Eugene Felt (1862–1930) was an American machinist who was known for having invented the comptometer, an early computing device. He was born in Rock County, Wisconsin and grew up on the family farm there.
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currency is a unit of exchange, facilitating the transfer of goods and/or services. It is one form of money, where money is anything that serves as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a standard of value. A currency is the dominant medium of exchange.
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One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured.
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weight is a measurement of the gravitational force acting on an object. Near the surface of the Earth, the acceleration due to gravity is approximately constant; this means that an object's weight is roughly proportional to its mass.
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A calculator is a hand-held device for performing calculations. Although modern calculators often incorporate a general purpose computer, the device is designed for performing specific operations, rather than for flexibility.
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Computer software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some task on a computer system. [1]
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A genericized trademark, generic trade mark, generic descriptor, or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name that has become the colloquial or generic description for or synonymous with a particular class of product or service.
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