The Anita

1961 · Thyratron Tube Desk Calculator · Work 922 of 1,871

A payroll office in London on a rainy morning, on an oak desk a broad low calculator forty centimetres wide with a cream-beige case, its sloping blue-grey keyboard set with ten columns of round cylindrical keys in alternating cream and grey, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, at the back a raised dark blue panel with a row of twelve small glass tubes glowing soft orange, along the front a plain chrome strip with a plain blue panel, beside it an adding machine under a grey cloth cover, a woman in a knitted cardigan seated at the machine, seen from directly behind, face turned fully away, rain on a tall sash window.

What it was used for
The Anita Mk 8 was an electronic desk calculator, developed by the Bell Punch Company and sold in Britain by Sumlock Comptometer. For its December 1961 issue Office Magazine had Sumlock train a 16-year-old typist with no calculating machine experience; after an hour of instruction and an hour of practice she could handle tasks such as invoice extensions and stock control, tested on wage and currency calculations in pounds, shillings and pence. A works photograph shows an Anita Mk 8 in an accounts department around 1963; after comparing two captions Nigel Tout concludes it is the accounts department of the London department store Selfridges. A manufacturer's advertising caption names banks and other concerns throughout Britain and firms abroad as users. The parent company Lamson Industries admitted in The Times on 30 April 1962 that production planned for late 1961 had been set back by technical and supply difficulties; substantial volumes came only from December 1962.
What was new
The Anita computed with no moving parts except the keyboard: about 180 cold-cathode tubes, one Dekatron as clock, a single transistor, a 12-digit display. Office Magazine put the difference in 1961 by saying there had been no such breakthrough in desk calculators since Willgodt Odhner perfected his pinwheel machine in 1874, and that the Anita computed not only quickly but in complete silence. The full keyboard, as on the mechanical Comptometer, had an advantage: pressing a key added the number at once, and all fingers could work simultaneously - a trained operator added 10 numbers in 5.5 seconds. That very silence was a defect in practice: operators converting from mechanical Comptometers at first missed the noise that had told them when a calculation began and ended.

What the sources leave open: The expansion of the name is not settled: Nigel Tout writes that ANITA stands "variously" for "A New Inspiration To Arithmetic" and "A New Inspiration To Accounting"; the Smithsonian gives none. Dates differ within the family: the Mk 8 was shown in London in October 1961, the Mk VII was ready for sale in late 1960 per Nigel Tout, while chief engineer John Lloyd says a working prototype existed only in 1960 and dates the Mk 8 launch to September 1961.

Further reading