Texas SR-60A - New WEB for francis-teyssier.com

This machine had an unfortunate fate, being released at the wrong time. Let me explain: this desktop calculator was designed for calculations related to interest rates, loan, etc. So primary customers were Real estate business, insurance groups. However the late 70's were not the best time to have such a business. I will explain later in this page, but first let's have a look at this machine:

As you can see this is a big desktop machine, with plenty of keys to play with. The display was LED but not only you could display numbers, you could also display plain letters, such as short text. On the right side of the keyboard, the opening was for a magnetic card reader. A small printer is visible also on the left.

The keyboard had a total of 95 keys. You have all the scientific functions, such as square root, square, ln, etc. And you also have the trigonometric keys for sin,cos,tg,..

This is aprogrammable machine, with plenty of space to write programs, and even save them on magnetic cards. So why did it have such a small life and was only sold in small quantities.

Let's go back to 1977:

Well, that was one thing, but what would be more interesting is to look at the cost of living at that time:

Yep, this nice calculator would go for almost 1/2 the price of a car, but still about 2 month of salary. But you will tell me, this was for business owners. Yes indeed. But look at the interest rate :

This is why these offices were not working so well. At the same time, you could buy an HP-67 for $450. Not a desktop, but a portable very powerful calculator with programs and magnetic cards too.

At the same time, the price of the calculators was falling every day. LED displays were being replaced with LCD and this is why the SR-60A had such a short life.

Now, I will not go inside the calculator to give you all details, as this was already done on several web sites, such as the wonderful one for datamath: http://www.datamath.org/Desktop/sr-60a.htm