Robert Ragen died in 2012 and an obituary may be found here.įriden now had a worthy successor to the SRW and the EC 130 soon became very successful. Further links to interesting information about him are here, here and here. He appears to have been a modest and very well-liked indiviual. Robert Ragen is too little known, an unsung hero of the dawn of electronic calculators. Its results were shown on a glowing blue-green screen, it used Reverse Polish notation, it displayed all four levels of the calculation stack on screen and it was housed in a beautiful case that still says "modern", over fifty year later. The (screenless, print-only) Olivetti 101 was on the market a few months before the EC 130 but the EC 130 was the groundbreaking machine that announced the arrival of the electronic age. The ANITA machines were already on the market but were vacuum tube based imitations of mechanical calculators.
The EC 130 was (nearly) the first solid state electronic calculator on the market. The EC-130 & EC-132 Electronic Calculatorsįriden found their designer in Robert Ragen and their successor machine in his radically modern Model EC 130. Further interesting information about the display development and Friden's general development approach may be found at the Old Calculator Museum Blog.įriden's second problem was to find a designer for the electronic machine that would be a worthy successor to the Model SRW. This was patented and assigned to Friden (see Friden Library and Links for a copy of the patent). Friden addressed this in 1961 by engaging the Stanford Research Institute to explore the problem and in early 1962 they provided a solution in the form of an elecronics package that could draw sequences of digits in lines on the face of a cathode ray tube screen. A major initial problem was the lack of a satisfactory electronic display. One might contrast this approach with that of Singer, described at the bottom of this page.įriden appears to have been methodical in its approach to developing an electronic calculator.
Unlike other mechanical calculator companies in the 1950s, Friden did not attempt to enter the emerging computer or data processing businesses but instead set out to apply the new technology of electronic logic to its well-known and well-understood calculator business. In the 1950s Friden recognised the potential of electronic logic, perhaps assisted by its location in San Leandro California, an area soon to become better known as Silicon Valley. By the time of World War II Friden was a leading manufacturer of high-end desktop calculators, and by the 1950s Friden had achieved a mechanical tour-de-force with the Model SRW that could automatically extract square roots. The Friden Calculating Machine Company was established in 1934 and his improved mechanical calculator soon became a great success. Carl Friden was a gifted mecanical engineer, early in his life he worked for the Marchant calculator company but by the 1930s he was working on his own mechanical inventions, including a greatly improved mechanical calculator.