Western Railroad Discussion > A very Calculating photo.....

How many of our older members remember these monsters that the Santa Fe used.....?

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Gosh Wes, that does bring back memories. When I took my first job after I got out of school back in 1963, I acutally used one of those old Freiden machines for a year or so. I all seems so long ago now....

I guess that's why I'm called "olddude41"...

Larry W. Grant
Dallas, Texas

OK I give UP what is it ?????

ROBERTOLSON Wrote:
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> OK I give UP what is it ?????

Jez, talk about a generation gap.

It did exactly the same thing as a pocket calculator does today, except weighting about 50 pounds it wasn't quite so portable, and made about as much noise as a teletype machine, if you know what THAT is.

MTMEngineer Wrote:
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> ROBERTOLSON Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
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> > OK I give UP what is it ?????
>
> Jez, talk about a generation gap.
>
> It did exactly the same thing as a pocket calculator does today, except weighting about 50
> pounds it wasn't quite so portable, and made about as much noise as a teletype machine, if you know
> what THAT is.

One other point. I believe that these machine cost about $1500 in 1950's dollars and most only did adding, subtraction, multiplication and division. There were a few specialized calculators that did square root. Also they were relatively maintenance intensive. I remember playing with one in my fathers office in the 50s. Now you can more capability for less than $10 and put it in your pocket.

Seeing the Freiden also brings back memories. I did computer programing in 1965 on a LGP-30 that used a Frieden Flexowriter for input and output. It would was a fancy typewriter that also had paper tape input and output. Anyway, I used it to "word process" my undergraduate thesis before that term was even invented. I forget how much memory the LGP-30 had but it had a rotating drum memory with a certain number of tracks.

I worked in an office at International Harvester where there were about thirty or so of these beast. What l remember most is the noise when they were being used at the same time plus the fact they took up a good size portion of your desk top. For you younger viewers,that's wooden desk top

I worked for the Arizona Highway department in the mid 70's and we still used these monsters for Surveying and materials lab calculations. I've still got an almost new aluminum Pickett slide rule also.