There was quite a famous camera called the Vest Pocket Kodak - perhaps they were copying that. Maybe there was a whole bunch of Vest Pocket Things, back when vests had pockets.
I used an addiator-type device, along with my slide rule, through undergraduate (math) and graduate (ocean physics) school, 1970-78. Near the end, 4-function calculator prices fell to what I could afford.
The way you presented this is so humorous. Never interested in calculator from the big-bang period but I've sit through 4 of them. Good laugh each time.
The "Baby Calculator" has pretty much the same physical operation. No "candy cane" carry metalwork. The Tasco version is cooler. Has the candy cane thing but subtraction is done with a metal slide-up screen that mimics the subtraction scheme of the Addiator. I'm with you on the Addiator though: the carry and shift over one column bit is easier to understand and work on the Addiator. On the Tasco and the "Baby Calculator" you have to remember to start with 1 instead of using the 0. . . . Also, if you go searching for "Baby Calculator," you may find adverts for a thing that helps you figure out when to get someone pregnant so the child will be hatched in a particular range of dates. Like if you want your child to be cursed with vampirism, you can plan for it to be born on December 25, like in the old movies. . . . I'm so glad I live in the 21st Century. All the uses we have for modern technology these days. And no folded sheet metal calculator thingies with stylii. I'm still waiting for the flying cars though.
More way cool stuff! If I were starting college again I very well might come to your school just so I could take a class from you! I have a feeling it would be a very educational and entertaining experience…
A bead abacus is faster than any of these if you've got skills, but they required more training because they don't have any mnemonics to help with carrying. Also, an abacus generally needs to be used on a flat surface and you could use these while holding them in your hand. When I was a kid, the prevalence of abacus-like baby toys in the US gave the abacus a kind of infantile stigma. But that might have just been later.
It's got the ten's-complement digits for subtraction, but no hooks down at the bottom to complete the borrow in a subtraction. Did the instructions just tell you to do that manually? I guess they might have prioritized making addition as simple as possible over helping you with subtraction. The Addiator had separate slots for that; others had a sliding cover that exposed different hooks; the Magic-Brain just put them at the top and bottom and you had to remember which ones to use for your operation (which is not so hard if you have a general sense of how addition and subtraction work). "Perhaps one in a 1000 cases" is kind of an interesting statement--obviously it's hokum, but during everyday number-adding tasks, how common is a multiple carry really? Obviously it's not a well-defined question, but I suppose Benford's Law might make it less common than 1 in every 10 carries, depending on how big your numbers are and how they came about. It'd probably converge to 1 in 10 carries if you added up a big column of numbers or very big numbers. Got to think about that some more.
@@ChrisStaecker ...A little update on this: I actually put together a little Monte Carlo experiment in Sagemath where I can add pairs of numbers out of some probability distribution, and figure out how often it hits a case where you carry but the digit to the left is already a 9. I had to make some assumptions: I assumed you're adding digits right to left, which means it's only the digit to the left in the first number that matters. If the distribution is uniform, so any digit is as common as any other, then on any given digit you'd have to carry about half the time. And if it's not the leftmost digit, the probability of the digit to the left being 9 would converge to 10%. So you'd expect to run into this double carry situation about 5% of the time, and in fact it does seem to converge to that from below as the numbers get huge. But of course that's 5% of digit columns, not 5% of numbers. So if there are many digits in the numbers, it becomes almost certain it will happen at some point. But that's not so realistic. I tried modeling smallish numbers, say two or three digits, as things like Pareto and lognormal distributions, and, in fact, it seems like for a lot of vaguely realistic-looking situations the double carry is a lot less common, though maybe not 1 in 1000. For a Pareto with a minimum of 10 and a shape constant of 1 (decent model of "mostly two-digit numbers, generally not so big"), it's about 0.7% of additions. But I guess if it's dollars-and-cents kinds of things, you might be adding more digits generally--change that to a minimum of 100 to get mostly 3-digit numbers and you run into the double carry about 3.5% of the time. (I haven't tried using a lot of those classic prices like $3.99, which, as Frédéric Grosshans on Mastodon pointed out to me, ought to make it much more common!) Obviously everything is going to depend hugely on the distribution of the numbers. And I guess if you add big *columns* of numbers, by the Central Limit Theorem the distributions are going to look more and more normal, so that's potentially in the mix too.
It is silly. I love it. I had one donated to me and I thought about selling it - and maybe I still will - but it's really too fun and I want to play with it for a while.
I just acquired one of these, exactly like yours! I didn't know how to use it until now, Thanks for sharing.
There was quite a famous camera called the Vest Pocket Kodak - perhaps they were copying that. Maybe there was a whole bunch of Vest Pocket Things, back when vests had pockets.
I used an addiator-type device, along with my slide rule, through undergraduate (math) and graduate (ocean physics) school, 1970-78. Near the end, 4-function calculator prices fell to what I could afford.
The way you presented this is so humorous. Never interested in calculator from the big-bang period but I've sit through 4 of them. Good laugh each time.
Brilliant work! Keep it up!
The "Baby Calculator" has pretty much the same physical operation. No "candy cane" carry metalwork. The Tasco version is cooler. Has the candy cane thing but subtraction is done with a metal slide-up screen that mimics the subtraction scheme of the Addiator. I'm with you on the Addiator though: the carry and shift over one column bit is easier to understand and work on the Addiator. On the Tasco and the "Baby Calculator" you have to remember to start with 1 instead of using the 0.
. . . Also, if you go searching for "Baby Calculator," you may find adverts for a thing that helps you figure out when to get someone pregnant so the child will be hatched in a particular range of dates. Like if you want your child to be cursed with vampirism, you can plan for it to be born on December 25, like in the old movies.
. . . I'm so glad I live in the 21st Century. All the uses we have for modern technology these days. And no folded sheet metal calculator thingies with stylii. I'm still waiting for the flying cars though.
BUT WHAT DOES THE BB MEAN??
Good video. Don't know why're there just 3 comments and 4k views though.
It probably got stuck being recommended to children with adds turned off for 4 years
US $2.95 is equivalent to about $50 today.
That seems a bit steep.
In that age it was as practical as a smartphone so it worth the price.
More way cool stuff! If I were starting college again I very well might come to your school just so I could take a class from you! I have a feeling it would be a very educational and entertaining experience…
You didn't show subtraction it involves a 10's compliment process which implements the small numbers
Were standard-issue abaci banned in America at the time? That's what I would use for simple operations (except removing an appendix).
A bead abacus is faster than any of these if you've got skills, but they required more training because they don't have any mnemonics to help with carrying. Also, an abacus generally needs to be used on a flat surface and you could use these while holding them in your hand.
When I was a kid, the prevalence of abacus-like baby toys in the US gave the abacus a kind of infantile stigma. But that might have just been later.
It's got the ten's-complement digits for subtraction, but no hooks down at the bottom to complete the borrow in a subtraction. Did the instructions just tell you to do that manually? I guess they might have prioritized making addition as simple as possible over helping you with subtraction. The Addiator had separate slots for that; others had a sliding cover that exposed different hooks; the Magic-Brain just put them at the top and bottom and you had to remember which ones to use for your operation (which is not so hard if you have a general sense of how addition and subtraction work).
"Perhaps one in a 1000 cases" is kind of an interesting statement--obviously it's hokum, but during everyday number-adding tasks, how common is a multiple carry really? Obviously it's not a well-defined question, but I suppose Benford's Law might make it less common than 1 in every 10 carries, depending on how big your numbers are and how they came about. It'd probably converge to 1 in 10 carries if you added up a big column of numbers or very big numbers. Got to think about that some more.
Yes I also tried to think about how to measure "Perhaps one in a 1000 cases". Never got around to it!
@@ChrisStaecker I'm showing danger signs of getting interested in a question, which usually results in some kind of shambolic research.
@@ChrisStaecker ...A little update on this: I actually put together a little Monte Carlo experiment in Sagemath where I can add pairs of numbers out of some probability distribution, and figure out how often it hits a case where you carry but the digit to the left is already a 9. I had to make some assumptions: I assumed you're adding digits right to left, which means it's only the digit to the left in the first number that matters.
If the distribution is uniform, so any digit is as common as any other, then on any given digit you'd have to carry about half the time. And if it's not the leftmost digit, the probability of the digit to the left being 9 would converge to 10%. So you'd expect to run into this double carry situation about 5% of the time, and in fact it does seem to converge to that from below as the numbers get huge. But of course that's 5% of digit columns, not 5% of numbers. So if there are many digits in the numbers, it becomes almost certain it will happen at some point.
But that's not so realistic. I tried modeling smallish numbers, say two or three digits, as things like Pareto and lognormal distributions, and, in fact, it seems like for a lot of vaguely realistic-looking situations the double carry is a lot less common, though maybe not 1 in 1000. For a Pareto with a minimum of 10 and a shape constant of 1 (decent model of "mostly two-digit numbers, generally not so big"), it's about 0.7% of additions. But I guess if it's dollars-and-cents kinds of things, you might be adding more digits generally--change that to a minimum of 100 to get mostly 3-digit numbers and you run into the double carry about 3.5% of the time. (I haven't tried using a lot of those classic prices like $3.99, which, as Frédéric Grosshans on Mastodon pointed out to me, ought to make it much more common!) Obviously everything is going to depend hugely on the distribution of the numbers. And I guess if you add big *columns* of numbers, by the Central Limit Theorem the distributions are going to look more and more normal, so that's potentially in the mix too.
It is silly. I love it. I had one donated to me and I thought about selling it - and maybe I still will - but it's really too fun and I want to play with it for a while.
Your pronunciation rationale would lead to people saying “biopic” like it rhymes with “myopic.” The real problem is: Vest Pockets.
What about 99,999.99 + 1?