Virtual Museum > The electronic revolution > CRT Display
FRIDEN is a company which has been making calculators for a very long time. Their mechanical calculators were considered the top of the line back in the 30's 40's and 50's. I do have a couple of them such as the ST10
In the 1960's, the electronic revolutionize everything, including calculators, and of course the company tried to make one using this new component: the transistor.
The result was the EC-130:
image from americanhistory website : http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1321784
The second model was the EC-132, which came out around 1965, and included a square root function ! However the Bulgarian calculator ELKA 6521 may have been launched a couple month earlier and won the title of the first electronic calculator in the world to have a square root function. There was a previous FRIDEN mechanical calculator with a square root function.