Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator

[Steve Thatcher]

my high school got one in 1971 and through the punch cards, you could get to binary &, |, and shift commands as well as program jumps. I have a complete one in a box with reader, manuals, unused punch cards, etc. It was an eBay nostalgia buy a few years ago. One of these days, I will be organized enough to have it on a table to play with it. It was always fun to see the flashing nixie tubes as it ran calculations.

As to the tech inside, I would expect that it was a multi-LSI "big" chip dedicated calculator design, so any memory was probably implemented as registers in the chips. JUst a gues anyway.

best regards, Steve Thatcher

-----Original Message-----
>From: Brian Knittel <brian at quarterbyte.com>
>Sent: Feb 28, 2008 10:58 PM
>To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>Subject: Re: Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator
>
>Ooooh! That's really cool. My high school had one of 
>these around 1975 or 1976, we used it before we talked them 
>into buying an Altair. The punch card unit was pretty spiffy,
>I think it used 8 of the row bits? And IIRC there were 
>instructions you could punch that were not available from 
>the keyboard. The cards were the votamatic type: hanging 
>chad and all. It was a lot of fun to program, and pretty 
>interesting and complex for a calculator.
>
>I'd love to know what the memory technology was inside 
>-- acoustic delay, static RAM, or what?