1971 · Programmable Printing Calculator · Work 883 of 1,871
A printing desk calculator on a light wood veneer desk in an office in Tokyo, a flat wedge-shaped machine with a cream-white body sloping toward the front, a dark grey key field with cream-white number keys and pale blue function keys at left and right, one small red and one small green button, all key tops plain and smooth, at the back a black angular printer cover with a plain smooth silver strip, a long curling strip of white paper running from a roll at the back over the edge of the desk, a hand in a white shirt sleeve pressing a blue key, a dark wooden abacus beside it, fluorescent light.
What it was used for
A printing desk calculator from Busicom, formerly Nippon Calculating Machine. The IPSJ Computer Museum gives October 1971 as the start of sales and records that Busicom also supplied the machine to other companies as an OEM product. By that account it was the first calculator into which the Intel 4004 was fitted. The Computer History Museum holds the engineering prototype (object X1320.97, 7 3/4 by 9 1/2 by 13 1/2 inches) that Busicom president Yoshio Kojima presented to Federico Faggin; its catalogue page calls it the successful test bed for the first commercial application of the 4004 and shows all 4 members of the MCS-4 family.
What was new
What marked it was not the calculator but how it calculated: in April 1969 Busicom asked Intel for 12 custom chips, and Intel proposed 4 instead, one of them programmable. The arithmetic routines therefore sat as a program in the chip set's ROM rather than in hard-wired logic, so changing a routine meant changing ROM contents. That the same chip set could later be sold for other jobs followed from this. Intel's own account credits Ted Hoff with the counter-design and names Faggin, who took over design leadership from Hoff, Stan Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima as contributors; according to the IPSJ museum, Busicom had already planned a calculator adapted through software rather than hardware.
What the sources leave open: None of the checked sources gives a price, production figure or chip count for the 141-PF. The sting comes from Intel itself: in May 1971 Robert Noyce bought back the rights for non-calculator uses and returned Busicom's 60,000 USD development investment; that page says Busicom went bankrupt in 1974. I found no second, independent confirmation of the bankruptcy year.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.