CDC Remote Calculator, circa 1965

[Rick Bensene]

Chuck wrote:

> 
> Ad for a CDC 6600 remote calculator terminal on ePay, item
> 390046087434.
> 
> Has anyone seen one of these in the flesh, or was this a trial
> balloon that never flew?
> 

Here's a larger scan of the original ad:
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html

CDC patented the concept at a pretty detailed level.
It's in US Patent #3380031:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=pShQAAAAEBAJ&dq=3380031

Rumor has it, though unsubstantiated personally, that University of
Illinois had quite a number of these things.

With desktop calculator technology advancing at such a crazy rate in the
mid-1960's, the cost of a true desktop electronic calculator came down
very quickly, making a device such as this (though it was capable of
some advanced math functionality that wasn't typically available until
the Hewlett Packard 9100A in '68) very limited in terms of its practical
lifetime.

A great artifact of bygone days.  Wish that the eBay auction was for one
of the terminals themselves rather than just an ad -- would like to find
one of these for the museum.  It'd be a pretty simple job to write a
program on a computer to emulate the mainframe side of the connection
and bring such a device back to life, since it's rather hard to find a
running CDC 6600 system today (not to mention, finding the host-side
software).  The patent has enough information that seems that it'd be
possible to build a simulator (or better yet, a functional equivalent)
using today's technology.

Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com