29 Feb
2008
29 Feb
'08
7:51 a.m.
Monroe made several type of programmable calculators most of them were
rebadged Compucorp's.
Based on the Compucorp HTL-chipset (a very sophistycated bit-slice design),
memory is mostly static ram i2102.
Several types are displayed the oldcalculator website from Rick Bensene.
-Rik
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Thatcher" <melamy at earthlink.net>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator
my high school got one in 1971 and through the punch
cards, you could get
to binary &, |, and shift commands as well as program jumps. I have a
complete one in a box with reader, manuals, unused punch cards, etc. It
was an eBay nostalgia buy a few years ago. One of these days, I will be
organized enough to have it on a table to play with it. It was always fun
to see the flashing nixie tubes as it ran calculations.
As to the tech inside, I would expect that it was a multi-LSI "big" chip
dedicated calculator design, so any memory was probably implemented as
registers in the chips. JUst a gues anyway.
best regards, Steve Thatcher
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Knittel <brian at
quarterbyte.com>
Sent: Feb 28, 2008 10:58 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator
Ooooh! That's really cool. My high school had one of
these around 1975 or 1976, we used it before we talked them
into buying an Altair. The punch card unit was pretty spiffy,
I think it used 8 of the row bits? And IIRC there were
instructions you could punch that were not available from
the keyboard. The cards were the votamatic type: hanging
chad and all. It was a lot of fun to program, and pretty
interesting and complex for a calculator.
I'd love to know what the memory technology was inside
-- acoustic delay, static RAM, or what?