History of computing

   By 1900, a year earlier mechanical calculators, cash registers and calculating machines were redesigned with the use of electric motors in the submission of a variable as the position of gear. Since the 1930's companies like Friden, Marchant and Monro began producing mechanical desk calculators that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. Word «computer» (literally - "computer") called the post - these were people who used calculators to perform mathematical calculations. During the Manhattan project, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was the manager of a whole team of "computers", many of whom were women mathematicians, machining differential equations that are solved for military purposes. Even the famous Stanislaw Ulam Martin after the end of the war was forced to work on the translation of mathematical expressions in a solvable approximation - for a project of the hydrogen bomb.

   In 1948 appeared Curta - a small mechanical calculator, which could hold in one hand. In the 1950 - 1960 in the western market has several brands of similar devices. The first fully electronic desktop calculator was the British ANITA Mk. VII, who used the display on the tubes «Nixie» and 177 miniature tiratronovyh tubes. In June 1963, Friden introduced the EC-130 with four functions. He was fully transistorized, had a 13-digital solution for a 5-inch cathode-ray tube, and represent the company in the market price calculators 2200 $. The model EC 132 were added to the function square root and inverse functions. In 1965, Wang Laboratories produced LOCI-2, a desktop calculator based on transistors with 10 figures, who used the display on the tubes «Nixie» and could compute logarithms.

   In the Soviet Union at that time the most famous and widely used calculator was a mechanical adding machine "Felix" which was produced from 1929 to 1978 at the plants in Kursk, Penza, and Moscow.