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"World's Smallest Electronic Calculator" Sharp ELSI-8 Commercial 2 1971 Sharp Electronics
🕑 Added 2019-09-01 01:02:33 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_EL-8
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Sharp EL-8, also known as the ELSI-8, was one of the earliest mass-produced hand-held electronic calculators and the first hand-held calculator to be made by Sharp. Introduced around the start of 1971, it was based on Sharp's preceding QT-8D and QT-8B compact desktop calculators and used the same logic circuits, but it was redesigned to fit in a much smaller case.
Most electronic calculators before the EL-8 were intended for desktop use. Sharp's predecessor to the EL-8, the battery-powered QT-8B, was just a portable version of a compact desk calculator. The EL-8 was much smaller, small enough to be used in one's hand: 164 mm (6.46 in) long, 102 mm (4.02 in) wide, and 70 mm (2.76 in) thick, and weighing 0.72 kg (1.59 lb) with batteries. Although it was still too bulky to easily fit in a pocket, it was an important step toward the development of the pocket calculator.
The EL-8's original price in Japan was 84,800 Japanese yen. The U.S. retail price in 1971 was $345, equivalent to about $1,850 in 2010.
The operation and performance of the EL-8 are identical to its predecessor calculators, the QT-8D and QT-8B, because its logic circuits use the same set of four Rockwell-manufactured large-scale integrated circuits. Likewise, its keyboard has the same layout, including the combined ×÷ key, and it also uses magnetic reed switches.
The display, like that of the QT-8D, is an 8-digit vacuum fluorescent display with nine individual tubes: eight digit tubes and a single extra tube for the minus sign and overflow indicator. As with the QT-8D, the tubes are Iseden "itron" tubes with the same distinctive "handwritten" digit style and the same half-height "0". However, unlike the QT-8D, the EL-8 digit tubes only have eight segments to form digits, and the EL-8's extra tube is positioned at the top right corner of the display instead of at its right end. A separate lamp serves as a power indicator.
Power is supplied by an integrated rechargeable battery pack or by an external battery charger, which also serves as an AC adapter to allow the calculator to operate from AC power. The battery pack (model EL-84) contains six nickel-cadmium AA batteries connected in series, giving a total voltage of 7.2 volts and, with the original batteries, a total capacity of 450 milliampere-hours. (Present-day nickel-cadmium AA batteries have much greater capacity.) Battery life with the original batteries is about three hours, which gives an average power usage of about one watt. The battery charger (model EL-81) supplies power to the calculator's charging input at voltages of 8.7 and 9.6 volts; the combined input power rating is about 3.2 watts...
