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[5] Meanwhile, a 1960 paper – just five years later – refers to today's common calculator layout as "the arrangement frequently found in ten-key adding machines". [3] In any case, Bell Labs' testing found that the telephone layout with 1, 2, and 3 on the top row, was slightly faster in use than the calculator layout with them in the bottom row.
Now the user pressed the multiplication 1 key. The machine cycled once. To see the total the user was required to press a Total key and the machine would print the result on a paper tape, release the locked down keys, reset the adding mechanism to zero and tabulate it back to its home position. Modern adding machines are like simple calculators.
The first key-activated mechanical calculators and many cash registers used "parallel" keys with one column of 0 to 9 for each position the machine could use. A smaller, 10-key input first started on the Standard Adding Machine in 1901. [9] The calculator had the digit keys arranged in one row, with zero on the left, and 9 on the right.
The ten-key notation input method first became popular with accountants' paper tape adding machines. It generally makes the assumption that entered numbers are being summed, although other operations are supported. Each number entered is followed by its sign (+/−), and a running total is kept.
David Sundstrand (1880-1930) was a Swedish-born American inventor of the 10-key adding machine, 10-key calculator keyboard, a 10-keypad now used on computer keyboards, and a co-founder of Sundstrand Corporation. Sundstrand's 1914 adding machine had the first now common place keyboard for 10-key calculators and numeric keypads.
Although Dalton introduced in 1902 first 10-key printing adding (two operations, the other being subtraction) machine, these features were not present in computing (four operations) machines for many decades. Facit-T (1932) was the first 10-key computing machine sold in large numbers.
Burroughs developed a range of adding machines with different capabilities, gradually increasing in their capabilities. A revolutionary adding machine was the Sensimatic, which was able to perform many business functions semi-automatically. [citation needed] It had a moving programmable carriage to maintain ledgers.
Unlike Burroughs, these competing machines had "visible" printers that printed in view of the operator. Pike, Universal, and Wales machines had full keyboards like the machines produced by Burroughs. By contrast, Dalton Adding Machine and the Standard Adding Machine Company had more modern ten-key keyboards. [6]