The evolution of pocket and desktop calculators in the USSR

I won’t talk about abacus because only the lazy didn’t write about the history of mass buying of them by foreign tourists in the 90s.

First - desktop models...

All Soviet accounting departments had Felixes... Arithmometers, that is, are the heirs of Babbage's machine and the basis for the prosperity of IBM in the pre-computer era... We turn the knob and get the result.

Felixes are a Soviet unlicensed clone of the machine shown above... It was easy to learn, but twisting the handle when dividing was quite tedious. We take logarithms and trigonometry in tables. By the way, Soviet cash registers are also based on the same adding machine...

And this is also an adding machine, but an electromechanical one, the handle is turned by an electric motor. Different keyboards for different registers of the device. I don’t know how to calculate this. The sacrament is lost.

Also an electromechanical adding machine, but more advanced from the early 60s. Army model. With the help of such machines and entire halls with operators, our rockets were launched, and not only... Accuracy was achieved by parallelizing processes and comparing checksums.

And this is a completely electronic device from the early 70s - a lamp display, transistor filling.

By the end of the 70s, more advanced IC devices appeared

But the lamp indicator panel was a distinctive feature of the Soviet calculator for a long time.

Printing calculator - in the early 90s it was very popular for making all kinds of checks..

Now about pocket options

Probably the most common pocket calculator in the USSR until the mid-70s. Every engineer and technician was fully aware of the mystery of all four actions and trigonometric functions. Particularly advanced ones took logarithms...

One of the first electronic, but so-so pocket calculators.

Well, this is a very popular machine of the late 70s - it cost, according to my recollections, about 200 rubles.

Well, there’s a sea of intermediate models missing here, you can’t remember them all...

A very popular and quite reliable model from the mid-80s.

A writing instrument with a calculator was popular among managers around the same time...

And this is already the end of the 80s

And finally programmable calculators...

And even our answer to Chamberlain is a notebook...

Well, the swan song of the MK90...

Well, this is just a stand with a number of these cars that were not included in the review..