Calcupen - Francis WEB

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Calcupen

Virtual Museum > Electronic Golden Age > LED display


What we have here is a very interesting little gadget: a hybrid combining a calculator (with LED display) and a pen. That was a good idea, but unfortunately not a very successful product.
Users quickly realized that apart from the price ($79) the calculator was not easy to use, small buttons and 4 different functions on each. If you are like me, big fat fingers, it will prove to be a challenge.
On top of this, the pen was too heavy to be really useful for writing.

On the bottom of this page there is a small video showing how to use the pen.

The manufacturer is also a mystery. Several opinions can be found across the WEB, and one of them talks about SATOLEX, a japanese company. They built some pen-calculator later, but using an LCD technology, which made the pen much more useful and easy.
Here is an example from my collection:



Update 10/2015: I am now 100% sure that SATOLEX is the original company who built the Calcupen. Here are the proofs:
Original Patent for the Calcupen :



And then the original patent for the Satolex calcupen (LCD)



You will notice that it is the same company, the same inventors. They realised that the LED display was too heavy, and switched to an LCD one, and a better keyboard.

The same company also manufactured calcu-lighter, which is exactly like the name implies, a calculator and a lighter in the same box. I don't see how useful this could be, but why not?
I was lucky enough to buy one of these for not too much money:


I found a funny comment about these: they were used to calculate the MTBD (Mean Time Before Death)

Well, it will certainly be part of the calculator history, and still not easy to find.

To get an idea of how was the technology at that time, I looked at several pages of a Popular Science journal from 1977. Here is how a personal computer looked like:



An the latest calculator technology, the Commodore Programmable:



And I was surprised to see that they did have Electric Cars at that time. I wonder how many were sold, I have never seen any of these on the road:



This page was consulted time since August 2015
 
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