1964 · Learn-Mode Printing Calculator · Work 924 of 1,871
An oceanographic laboratory by a small harbour in Massachusetts on a summer morning, on a white laboratory bench a broad flat calculator sixty centimetres wide, its lower case painted turquoise with ventilation slots, its top plain cream on the left and black on the right with small panels of yellow, orange, turquoise and white set with round black and white keys and small knobs, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, behind them a raised black housing with an open printer and a round roll of white paper, a hand in a rolled-up sleeve turning a knob, a row of glass bottles of seawater, fishing boats in the window.
What it was used for
The Mathatron by Mathatronics was a programmable electronic desk calculator with a printer; according to the Old Calculator Museum its first paying customer was the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which put it to use on board a research vessel. The York University Computer Museum in Toronto holds a Mathatron 8-48, serial number 385, brought to the university by Ralph W. Nicholls, in 1965 founding director of the Centre for Research in Experimental Space Science - York's first computer, an IBM System/360 Model 30, arrived only in November 1966. The machine was used in the late 1960s and early 1970s by faculty and graduate students, and by written rule: use was restricted to CRESS staff, graduate students needed permission from G. R. Hebert, every use had to be entered in the log book, and the manuals were not to leave the room. A company insert of September 1967 names its audience as "scientists in many different disciplines".
What was new
The Mathatron could do what the slightly older all-transistor desk calculators could not: learn key sequences and run them with conditional and unconditional branches, with a printer, 24 or 48 program steps depending on model, and parenthesis keys so a problem could be entered as it is written; the main logic assembly alone holds over 1,000 transistors. The page calcmuseum.classiccmp.org calls it "perhaps the first machine that also has parenthesis keys" and, on its standing, hedges three times over, saying one could say it might possibly be the first device that could be called a desktop computer. What Olivetti's Programma 101 did better a year later is conceded by the Mathatron's own champion: the magnetic card stored the program outside the machine, so it did not have to be typed in each time.
What the sources leave open: The year is the weakest figure: announcement at NEREM in Boston in November 1963, first delivery according to the Old Calculator Museum as early as July 1963, production in 1964, a review in Computers and Automation in March 1964. The $5,000 price is an advertised price of 1966. No production figure is documented. On the maximum number of registers, 88 and 48 stand against each other.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.