Cool 4004 based calculator

From: Joe R. <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sat Jun 5 13:40:50 2004

At 11:01 AM 6/5/04 -0700, Rick Bensene wrote:
>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


  Yes, "for a time" is correct. But after Intel had designed the 4004 but
before they started delivery of them to Busicom, Busicom wanted to
re-negotiate the price for the 4004. One of the more insightful engineers
at Intel said OK but insisted that they (Intel) in turn get Busicom to drop
their exclusive rights to the 4004. The two companies meet and agreed to
both items and everybody went away happy. That was a very smart move on
Intel's part and the rest, as they say, is history.

   Joe




>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 - 13:40:50 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:36:55 BST