Hi, Sellam (and all),
Unicom was a company that was started up as a spinoff of IC maker American
Microsystems (AMI).
There's little out there about the history of the company in its early days,
but it's possible that Unicom
initially started out simply OEMing machines from Busicom, until they had
developed their own chips.
Busicom for a time had an exclusive on the 4004 as the result of their joint
effort with Intel to develop a
reconfigurable general purpose calculator chipset, which ended up morphing
into a microprocessor.
I do know that Busicom did OEM their machines to a number of different
marketers of early electronic
calculators, and perhaps Unicom was one of them. Busicom's machine with
the 4004 was the 141PF
(they weren't shy about recycling model numbers, as the 141 was a lower-cost
version of Busicom's first machine,
the 162, which was indeed a discrete transistor machine). The 141PF was a
printing only machine.
Looking at patent information, the architecture of the design was such that
it could be adapted (part of
the whole idea that spurred the development of the 4004 in the first place)
to use a display rather than a printer.
So, my guess (and it's just that at this point) is that the machine you have
is an adaptation of the original 141PF
design, done either by Busicom either on their own, or under contract to
Unicom, which was sold under the Unicom
brand name in North America. Later, AMI sold off the Unicom division to
Rockwell, and for a while, Rockwell
sold handheld calculators under this brand, then abandoned the Unicom brand
and sold their machines (using their own chips)
under the Rockwell brand, as well as through other OEMs.
In any case, this is an AWESOME find! I want pix!
I don't blame you for being stoked about this one. Hope that you can get
it running!
Regards,
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Web Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
Received on Sat Jun 05 2004 - 13:01:47 BST