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Pascal's calculator (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascaline) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen . [ 2 ]
The machine is about 67 cm (26 inches) long, made of polished brass and steel, mounted in an oak case. [1] It consists of two attached parallel parts: an accumulator , which can be thought of as an accumulator register which is found in older processor instruction set architectures , section to the rear, which can hold 16 decimal digits, and an ...
A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic automatically, or (historically) a simulation such as an analog computer or a slide rule.
Pascaline, 1642 – Blaise Pascal's arithmetic machine primarily intended as an adding machine which could add and subtract two numbers directly, as well as multiply and divide by repetition. Stepped Reckoner, 1672 – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter, and a bell. [9] The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic. [9] There was to be a store (that is, a memory) capable of holding 1,000 numbers of 40 decimal digits [15] each (ca. 16.6 kB).
The Comptometer was the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in the United States by Dorr Felt in 1887.. A key-driven calculator is extremely fast because each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulator as soon as it is pressed and a skilled operator can enter all of the digits of a number simultaneously, using as many fingers as required, making ...
The first prototype (the 1822 machine) had a capacity of 6 digits even though the machine described in the 1820 patent [1] is an 8 digits machine. The piano arithmometer with a capacity of 30 digits, allowing for numbers up to 1 nonillion (minus 1) , which was built for the 1855 Exposition universelle de Paris and which is now part of the IBM ...
He also designed a machine using Leibniz wheels in 1777. [6] Dr. Didier Roth, a French inventor, patented and built a machine based on that design in 1842. Izrael Staffel, a polish clockmaker introduced his pinwheel machine in 1845 at an industrial exposition in Warsaw, Poland and won a gold medal in 1851 at The Great Exhibition in London.