Burroughs Portable Adding Machine, a Detailed Look

I am a calculator collector I actually daily carry in HP 28c because it's awesome but I don't like to collect just any calculator early calculators were far more varied than their modern counterparts and had wildly different designs and display types that make them interesting to see the differences between but sometime around the mid-80s calculators started to become all the same without a lot of differences between them and that just makes them really boring now there are of course exceptions to these rules in unique cases like the highly programmable HP 12c or Cassio's line of color graphing calculators but I really don't want to get into adding machines well I guess that casio one-to-one l with it's very pretty VFD tubes is and so it was that interesting uni sonic one with the clock built in and then of course the mechanical bond context 10 how could I pass that up well I guess if I've made exceptions for those I can probably find an exception for one of these [Music] now I want to set the stage of why this adding machine was worth breaking my rule the history of Burroughs adding machine starts in the 1880s when William Burroughs designed and patented his first adding machine this happened in an era when there was a boom of miniature mechanical Marvel's in the same decade we saw the release of the first personal camera from Kodak the easily replaceable font typewriter from Hammond and the first automobile from Ben's the concept of calculators had existed since the 1600s but manufacturing limitations prevented them from becoming widespread but the 1880s was in the heat of the Second Industrial Revolution and rapid technological progress was being made it was all but inevitable that someone would produce a mass-market calculator and indeed there were many who sought to do just that Burroughs wasn't the first but despite and unfortunately early passing of its founder the Burroughs corporation went on to be a dominant force in the adding machine market they did this by buying competitors and through their own continuous internal development this resulted in a strong portfolio of capable machines these machines are usually designated by classes the first was a class 1 and the next major model was a class 3 based off of a pike adding machine both of these featured a visible counter or register that displayed the number you are currently working with they were also usually capable of printing numbers onto paper with varying sizes of plans being available the next major release was a dedicated calculator heavily based off of the Comptometer a company they did not buy out while not named such their device was commonly referred to as a comp domitor due to the established market of its competitor this led Comptometer to market its trademark name to prevent it from becoming genericized a problem Google faces to this day finally we get to the model I have here originally patented in 1926 this model would be released as the class 8 9 and 10 eights were capable of adding only nines featured dedicated subtracting and tens are less common and directed at financial use these machines were called the portable despite weighing in at 21 pounds in the case of mine burrows were also forward-thinking in designing these machines and planned to add an electric motor to eliminate the need for the crank this would later be at as an option when choosing your machine the portable was designed modularly to simplify production while offering a wider choice of these features the 6 8 or 10 column keyboards different widths and platanus true negatives along with the subtraction and electric options did not require significantly different base machines the portable model was extremely popular and the same basic design was kept in production until the 1960s while the earlier more elaborate machines may be the first and more desirable from a historic perspective the portable would be far more identified with burrows as a company continued designing developing and acquiring other companies and successfully made the transition to large-scale business computers they were also involved in the release of the venerable Nixie tube they were never a market leader in computers though since IBM came on the scene and stole the show burrows today has gone through a few mergers and acquisitions itself and while technically does still exist as an ATM servicing company it is mostly in name only so with the history of the Burroughs corporation when I found a Burroughs adding machine especially one of the more prominent models that they produced I felt it was worth breaking my know adding machine rule let's start off by taking a look at the difference between adding machines and calculators starting with an adding machine in its most basic form this is a very simple device that you've probably seen before it's a counter you press this button the number goes up by one you turn this knob and you can clear the number this is technically an adding machine though and more specifically it would be a key driven adding machine with a one that you can use in the rightmost column that is technically what this is adding machines work by maintaining a running total all they want to do is maintain a total that is the job of an adding machine usually they do this by adding to the total but they can also do other operations on the total sometimes but the most important thing you need to keep in mind is that they run a total calculators on the other hand are designed around the idea of working with to temporary numbers stored in registers registers are just storage locations in memory in the calculator that be used to access numbers that you put in now if I type in one we can see that the number has appeared here this would be called a visible register what happens when I press plus is the calculator copies the number from the visible register to a hidden register inside the calculator I then will type 2 which is put into the visible register overriding the one that was previously there when I press the equals sign because I also press plus it knows that I want to do an addition operation it's going to add the two registers together and put the result in the visible register now we can be sure of exactly what's going on here by pressing one plus and then equals because this has copied the number from the visible register to the hidden register when I press equals it adds the two numbers together because there was a 1 stored in the visible register this is not that easy on an algebraic notation calculator to understand which is why RPN calculators are a little easier to get the grips of now this is an HP 12c which I love and I've done a video all about using this calculator it's fantastic but the idea around RP n is that it is much better suited for calculators because the workflow for RP n is much better suited towards stack operations on a processor so let's take a look at that same thing again if I push one here I'm now displaying one in I think the X register and when I press ENTER I have copied it from the X register to the Y register when I type 2 I now have 2 in the X register now the 12c is a fairly advanced calculator allows you to swap the contents of the registers the X register here is a visible register in the Y register is a hidden register inside the calculator so this allows you to see the contents of both registers by swapping them and like before once I tell it what operation I want to do it performs it now I'm really not that good about following my own rules about not buying AG machines so here's another one made by Signet although I think this is actually a rebrand at uni sonic but that's not important right now this one is a good example that will help me dispel a myth that people seem to have about adding machines though that they must have a printer that isn't even related to the idea of working with a running total most adding machines would have a printer though because they would be used for working with financial calculations and having a running record of what's going on with those it's just a good idea however this adding machine is going to be useful for demonstrating how an adding machine works like a calculator with two registers except it uses one of them as a permanent running total so let's start out I'm going to enter in one just like before and this is now in the temporary working register if I oppress the plus equals key it is copied to the permanent total register now this calculator displays the temporary register when you type in a temporary value and then displays the total register when you press the plus equals key now keeping in mind the idea of a plus equals operation is ideal when you're working with an adding machine because that's how it wants to work with a running total now if I type in another number say nine it's going to switch to the temporary working register and then when I press plus equals it adds it to the total register and displays that you can do operations like say divided by two and then run it and that will modify the total register and that's how you could use an adding machine to do other more advanced calculations now let's blur the lines between calculators and adding machines even more with this gorgeous Sonne so box ICC 1600 which hey uses Burroughs released mixi tubes now this calculator has three registers two temporary working registers and one total register but when you're using this just as a calculator it doesn't ever use the total register I can do two plus one and save them backwards but it'll still add them correctly and we can see the result is three when I press one plus two again that is all that's displayed but if I enable the total register every time I press the equals key the number that is the result is copied to the total register if I do this again we'll see that nothing has changed but when I release the total key it will display the total registers value all right now that you have a more fundamental understanding of how calculators and adding machines work with their registers let's take a look at the Burroughs portable so this device has two registers one of them the temporary working register is visible right in front of you it is the numerical entry grid which is how you type in the temporary working number you can clear this by pressing error when you need to not enter your number into the total register which is hidden inside the machine now you can print the total register in one of two ways you can either press the sum total key up here which will print it but not clear it or you can press the total key which will print and clear the register now this calculator does only use a printing mechanism for the output so there is no visible register which is unfortunate because it means you don't know what the total register is while you're working with this machine this is something that some of the other options that were available at the time did actually have and while I don't have a Burroughs class 1 or class 3 I do have a Comptometer which was one of the main competitors to the Burroughs machines of the day now the Comptometer works a bit differently than the Burroughs and its total register is visible with these digits down below any time you add a number to it you can always see what the new total is this makes it a lot easier to work with because you don't have to try and keep in mind what the total might be or reprint it every time you want to see it a fun little side note here back to the counter this device and the Comptometer are very similar and as long as I keep pressing the one key in the right column here you can see how these are effectively equivalent all right now let's start to take a closer look at the Burroughs starting with the input register or the numeric keypad now these keypads came in different configurations mostly with different columns this is an 8 column model but you could also get 6 and 10 columns I am quite happy having an 8 column because I think I get a little too busy with their 10 comms on here now if you've ever seen one of these and been a bit confused and overwhelmed by how many buttons there are this is actually a very simple device each one of these columns represents one digit in the input register so if I want to display say 23 I could just hit 2 and 3 except I wouldn't hit those keys the colors also have meaning these are decimal points these are hundreds and these are thousandths so if I wanted to represent 23 I would actually type 2/3 here now you are free to type anything you want wherever you want but when you go to print out the results it will put in decimal point punctuation z' that indicate the positions of the numbers so if you want the paper to have the correct meaning you do need to respect the different column values while we're zoomed in here you may have noticed that this is a ribbon based printer and that mine is outfitted with black and red ink this is not actually important you can ignore the red side completely the subtraction doesn't do anything with red someone who used this machine previously just put a red and black spool on here modern adding machines that do still exist can print in multiple colors and use ribbons so it's very likely this is just a modern ribbon and that was what they had available at the time when they needed to replace this all right now let's take a look at using the Burroughs adding machine but because this is such a large working area versus such a tiny printing area I am going to go ahead and record the paper feed with my phone and superimpose this over here so you can see exactly what's happening up there because it is really difficult to see now let's begin so I've cleared my total by pressing down this key and pulling this so I'm gonna go ahead and feed this ahead and we can begin so let's start off by doing what we've been doing before and doing one plus two so I'm going to first push down b1 key in the first digit of the white column and then I'm going to pull the crank which will add it to the storage register and it's going to print a 1 onto the paper to mark that a 1 was added to the total now this is designed to use a paper to print out the history of everything that has happened to the total but there is an option to do a non ad printing so if I want to print just whatever I want I can use this and it will print a number out but it will not affect the total so that's something to know okay now let's go ahead and add two to the storage register so I'm going to press a two on the first column of the white area and then pull the crank and we've now added two if I press a sum total and print it we can see that we are now at three and the print out here has several different parts but we'll take a look at that in just a little bit so you can get an idea of how this works and then when I want to print and clear the total finally I press down the read total key and you can see all of these hammers pop up and then clear down as the total register is cleared now let's take a look at these hammers and some really clever design decisions that went into this so I'm going to go ahead and print all 9s as a non ad and this will just raise up all of these hammers to their maximum positions so these work by raising and lowering the hammers to get to the number that you need to print the numbers are on the other side of the hammers and then they are pulled back although one of them is a little gummed up and slammed against the paper that is how it prints that is very ingenious to have such a tiny printing mechanism compared to typewriters of the day I just love that it's so compact now we can also see that it printed as I'd mentioned earlier a comma and a decimal point this is very faint I know but they are there now if I press the nine and nine in the second and sixth columns and pull those up we can see these hammers are just a little bit wider than the other hammers and that's because on the other side these hammers commas and decimal points respectively alongside every single digit they print this is what allows it to print those digits or those punctuation marks when you are printing the digits very very clever and here's what the other side of those hammers looks like now as far as I know that one slightly sticking hammer is the only issue that my unit has which is very impressive considering its age one interesting note about these is that using the serial number engraved on the front of them you can date when they were produced if you can find some guides on what the serial numbers were in certain years based on what I've been able to find online my exact unit here would have been produced in 1941 so this is a nearly 80 year old adding machine that is just crazy impressive it works fantastically for its age I love old stuff like this now speaking of its age I need to address its condition on the exterior it's actually pretty darn dirty and I'm not really sure how I want to address that on the one hand I like my stuff being nice and presentable but on the other hand this is almost old enough to the point where this would be considered patina and it's a little more complicated than just say cleaning a piece of brass because inside there are a lot of moving parts that need to have grease on them and if I just spritz this with water and try and wipe it off it's going to drip down inside and possibly damage the mechanisms over time so I need to be very careful now I do have some ideas I have this thick piece of yarn or whatever this is and I can thread this in between the keys and actually that is that's doing quite a lot I hadn't really tried this yet but that is a significant improvement oh yeah I'm gonna go ahead and finish this okay yeah um you know what I think I will try and clean this dry because that was a huge improvement and if I can continue that then this thing could look pretty darn spiffy so I'm just gonna do this for a while now all right yep that made a huge improvement great now I actually want to go on a little bit of a cleaning kick with this so let me show you how you take this a part of it so first thing I'm gonna do here is tear the paper and let that go behind my desk and now we're going to remove the whole platen area now this is only held in with two screws but you do have to remove these two to get to those two screws so let me do this really quick here and we'll get in so first off you have your paper release lever once you have that done pull back you can respawn your paper the paper is held on with this piece which frequently gets lost there are people who've replaced this by just bending a paperclip into a shape where it jams down into some little slots in the back down in there and then hooks on to this so it's really not that important if you're missing this piece but it is something to be aware of with those out of the way we can see that this is disgusting um but we can get to this screw here which goes down and in and then we have to get to the other one which is underneath of this panel and of course because this thing was designed in the 20s it's all flat heads this out of the way which is fairly tight up against that ribbon guide unfortunately so you're likely gonna scratch that paint there's really not any room to stick anything else in there we can actually see the other screw down in here and from here I'm going to make a bit of a recommendation so you see this part right here as you pull this forward that part moves back I'm going to recommend moving the crank most of the way forward because this will position the so it lifts straight up and off and then it is very easy to get to everything underneath and that's all there is to remove the platen now I mentioned that you could get different lengths platen to put on this and that's because you could fit a full-sized sheet of typewriter paper into the platen and move it back and forth to type on to columns that's some we'll look at later in this video but if you ever have one of these and you want to replace the platen with a larger one that's how easy it is that's there's almost nothing on here that interfaces with the calculator itself it's just the line advance on the bottom that will move the paper to the next line and position that's this actually you know here it is this is it's somewhere in there but anyway it will pre move the ribbon and it will position the paper to the next line so we can put that aside and now we can get to this and there are two more screws on the front and the crank is actually really easy to remove you just pull it off and I guess let's just go all in on this oh wait there is one more thing I live for remove the subtractor key now on some models of this the subtraction would actually be a lever positioned down here and I do have a picture of one of those so you might have a lever down there and then you don't have to worry about taking this off but if you do have a key for it then you'll need to undo a screw here and then you should be able to just slide that off now one thing to keep in mind and I'll mention this probably again when I put this back together it's a head the first time I took this apart I actually had to reposition the back of the case because the subtractor key was rubbing up against the case but after that's done I should just be able to lift this up and there are the guts all right now here's part of why I don't want to attempt to remove the keypad to clean this even though it's really really dirty in here we can see that we have this piece that's screwed to the keypad but get to those screws I would either need some kind of super short screwdriver or to take this off at the bottom plate but that doesn't even begin to address the issues because this piece runs onto this bar which goes through the solid metal plates that make up the core of this thing and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that every single one of these pieces is one of those and they go all the way through the keypad so I would have to get my way through the main core of the machine to get to that so totally disassembling this to get the keypad off just to clean it it's not that appealing so I'm probably not going to do that it's just too much work and it's too likely to damage it because there are so many little things going on in here like take a look at this when I press down one of the keys see it moves this spring now that spring if it broke I'm pretty sure this just wouldn't work anymore for that column so there's probably a lot of little parts like that in there that I just need to make sure don't get damaged and if I go ripping this thing apart without really knowing what I'm doing I'm likely to do that so I'm not going to do that right now but this is very dirty so I am going to try and brush out as much of all of this as I can let me start out by taking off this seal thing that goes between the two parts of the chassis so I can get to even more and then I'll begin this stuff is mostly going to be a combination of oil and dust so while it looks really gross it's not that bad this thing has just been around for a long time that's all you know this area I can use us all that on let me go get something for that that was easier than any typewriter I've ever cleaned because the keys are well glyphs are all right here but it's also more difficult because I could see every single thing that was wrong with them oh yeah but I think that's going to print a lot cleaner now I decided to experiment a little bit with wet cleaning with a paper towel wrapped around it so hopefully no fluid gets underneath and Wow possible it's really not feasible because of how much effort it's going to take there are 72 number keys on here that's that's that's too many although I feel like that was fairly successful overall so I think I'm gonna get a little risky here and slightly dampen a towel that's it and try and just rub the tops of the keys let's see what that does alright I can make the white keys look pretty good because the crud built up in the numbers isn't going to impact them too much but make the black keys look kind of weird but uh I think it's worth it I'm gonna go ahead and just do it get it done okay I kind of just ended up going for it so it turned out this stuff was really good for interleaving in between here to make up well not quite watertight seal but it would at least catch everything I was able to really well clean that keyboard actually without having to disable it or disassemble it I am very very happy with that result so that's cool I can't really get under these to fully clean this piece you would seriously have to remove all of the keys and they're threaded through metal plate back and it's just no no no I don't know that's that's not happening so I think that's a pretty good compromise I'm probably gonna go ahead and try and clean this ring off around the edge of it because it is possible yeah that worked really really well alright now when it comes to cleaning the case I mean some parts of this are pretty obviously gonna be easy just wipe all this down off of here and then that's gone but I did read that the indented areas on the sides of it have a coating in here to make it a satin finish and that it can be soluble with well even just water so I'm a little concerned about trying to clean that so on the back as my back is pretty messed up already on this let me try a little bit of my knockoff Windex and see what happens I don't think I'm really wearing through it if I am it's very minor let me try now well front really really use something because this is adhesive from something I'm not really sure what so let me try that so it's cracked like a dry lakebed type thing and I think that may have made it crack a lot more I can see in the corners here it is disappearing okay so it does care doesn't need to be taken that's really frustrating a a lot of the surfaces of this thing have that stuff on it it's gonna make it really hard to clean all right I cleaned this up a bit I took it out and cleaned it because it's just it's too much fluid in here so I just did it somewhere else and I think I'm gonna go take this outside and use an air compressor on it because it just has so much dust all around in it that's just yeah that needs to be dry-cleaned first for your alright I'm gonna go with that it's not perfectly clean but the objective here isn't to perfectly restore this I'm not going to go through all of that trouble it would take way too much effort and then honestly part of a thing that makes this cools the it's it has history so I don't really want to clean all of that off of it I'm sure if I really wanted to I could probably find a better specimen but I don't need that so I'm just gonna leave it as is and go ahead and get it put back together here well that was a lot more in-depth for the cleaning that I really intended on doing but hey it looks so much better now and I think it's time we actually get back to taking a look at what this thing can do so let's move on to using subtraction on this now I have the easy on my Burroughs because mine is a class 9 with a subtractor if you have a class 8 that does not have a subtractor built in there is a way that you can still do subtraction and I will talk about how you go about that but first let's cover doing it with subtraction so I'm going to punch in 10 first now I've already cleared the total and to do 10 I just need to push this one you'll notice there is no zero key down here and that's because it assumes that if you're printing this far over but don't have any keys over here it must all be zeros so you don't need to worry about that so I will go ahead and add my 10 now I'm going to subtract 5 so I'm going to go over to 5 here hit the subtract er which is going to lock in and then pull the crank 5 will be subtracted and this hammer rose up and printed a subtractor that way you know that it is a subtraction operation as opposed to an addition operation and if we print the sum total here we will see we have 5 now here's one thing to note about these there is an option for the burroughs machines to have a true negative now I talked about this in my bond context 10 video but most mechanical calculators like this will underflow their registers if you try to go below 0 so if I say subtract 6 the number that's going to be in the register is going to be all nines because it doesn't know how to represent negative values this is a downside of mechanical calculators but some of these apparently can have true negatives as a feature I don't know exactly how that works but it would be cool to see that so I'm probably going to be on the lookout to see if I can find one of those but for now that's pretty much it for subtraction but how do you do subtraction if you don't have a subtractor built-in now in order to show you how to do subtraction without subtraction I'm going to use the Comptometer because it's designed for this now the Comptometer is a whole other type of calculator and I don't really want to get into how it works right now but just keep in mind that when you press a key it's immediately added to the register and pulling the crank resets it not adds it so let's begin I'm going to do 10-5 so I'm gonna punch in 10 which is as it is on the Burroughs but now for subtraction it gets a little different now you may have noticed that the Comptometer has more numbers printed on the keys you have the typical numbers that you use when you're adding but it also has these other smaller numbers these numbers are the nines complement you would use these numbers to trick yourself into doing subtraction using addition so the idea of a 9s complement is that you're going to add a number to the point where it would be equivalent to having done a subtraction now this is done by having 0 through 8 labeled on the keys and if you need to subtract 9 you just don't do anything so that's how this is laid out so let's say I want to subtract 5 now there is one other problem here so usually you would think you would go down to just the 5 and the small numbers and hit that but you're actually going to be adding 4 which would mean that the result would be 14 because of a quirk of 9s complement you need to add 1 to the rightmost digit when you're doing a subtraction so we're actually going to subtract 4 but really we're adding 5 then when we do this we can see we're at 15 and if we done a subtraction this one would have gone away now there is one trick that we can do to make this work if we go back to 10 we can borrow a 0 so we can that the leading number here is a zero and do the four again and we will have this but we're still not out of the woods yet because we added a 1 there well one feature of the Comptometer is that it has these levers down here that allow you to prevent a carryover so if we borrow a zero again and do the subtraction this will work out and give us the result we want now this can be applied to more complex numbers as well let's say we have 88 and we want to subtract 25 the answer would be 63 so let's go ahead and try this we're going to punch in two and that's up here and five but we need to do four instead because as the leftmost number we're going to prevent a carryover do our subtraction and we get 63 now that we know how this works and we know how these nines complement numbers are arranged on the keys starting at zero going down to eight we can take this concept over to the borough's all right so let's go ahead and do subtraction on this calculator so we're going to do ten minus five first so I've already cleared the total and I'm gonna go ahead and add 10 to the hidden total register now this is where this starts to become annoying that you can't see the total register is because now I don't know what's in it and I don't know how to do the carry overs so you can only do subtractions if you really know what's in the total register unfortunately but since I'm doing a very simple calculation here and I do know what's in it I can accommodate for this so I'm gonna do 10 minus 5 again I know 10 is in the register so I know if I put 0 1 2 3 4 5 but then go up 1 in I will end up with the correct answer but I also know that there is a 1 in this column now I can borrow a 0 here but I'm not going to carry prevent the carry over because there are no carry over prevention switches you can however work around this by just placing nines in all of the columns going over this will continue to carry over completely away so if we go ahead and do this and then print the results we can see we get five now let's go ahead and do the more complicated 88 - 25 so I've cleared the register let's punch in 88 all right we're gonna minus 25 so 0 1 2 0 1 2 3 4 5 go up 1 and then we're going to clear over with the nines print the total and it should be 63 and it is and that's how you can do subtraction without a subtractor on an adding machine so those are the basics of doing addition and subtraction on an adding machine but this is capable of multiplication and division as well and even has a very handy feature for doing that this is the repeat key when you press it in and add a number to the total register it doesn't clear the keyboard normally when you put in a number and pull the crank it releases all the keys in the keyboard but the repeat key allows you to continue doing operations with the number in the temporary working register this makes multiplication very quick all right let's do one of my favorite examples for multiplication twelve times twelve so I'm going to start out by entering twelve here I'm going to hold down the repeat key now just like I initially demonstrated on the bond context 10 there's nothing stopping you from just pulling the lever twelve times and then the result would be 12 or 144 12 squared that is but there's a much faster way of doing this that requires you to only pull the lever three times so let's try this again I'm gonna punch and repeat I'm gonna put in 12 I'm gonna pull the lever twice then I'm going to clear the keyboard and move over one column and pull the lever again then I will print the total and we get 144 this is done by just moving over the multiplication like you would do it by hand and this is so simple on a grid driven adding machine that it's really powerful actually and makes things very easy to work out so let's say we wanted to do a real world example I want to know how many hours there are in a year so I'm going to do 365 times 24 so I'm going to enter 3 6 5 as the number of days in the year and then we're going to multiply this by 24 so we're starting off in the first column we're going to add 365 four times so let's go ahead and hold down the repeat key 1 2 3 4 now we're going to clear we're going to move this over and we're going to do this two times and now we can clear print the total and we have 8760 hours in a year this is a very quick and easy way to do multiplication next is division and division on an adding machine can be a little tricky so in order to show you how this works I'm going to first run through it on my phone contacts 10 this is an adding machine with a division feature built-in now I've already done a video that fully explains how this works but in brief this basically just handholds you through the steps of doing division as you would on a normal adding machine so let's start off by doing 144 divided by 12 now when you're doing division on an machine you typically want to put the number as far over to the left in the register as possible if you have as much working space as you can when you end up with a non whole number result in this case we don't really need to worry about that because we know our answer is going to be twelve okay so let's start off with entering in the number as we need to clear this over to the left as well now what we're going to do is subtract 12 from this number starting in the left and then moving our way over to the right and we need to count how many times we can subtract it this is just like doing division by hand except the machine is going to do it for us now the Bond context 10 has a counter for the times that you actuate the plunger the red number is for the times when you're doing subtraction and division is a subtractive process so I'm going to go ahead and press the plunger once we can see this number went down by 12 and the counter went up by 1 we want the bottom number I will press it again the register under float and this means that we went too far the this calculator knows that we went too far and we'll actually go back and now the plunger is locked this is letting us know that the answer for the first column is 1 next we will continue on and it will begin the subtractive process on the next column so we pressed it once we pressed it twice and now we know the answer for the next column is 2 and those are 1 & 2 for 12 which is the answer but you'll notice that the end result in the register is 0 now let me walk you through how this worked all right now I'm going to do the same operation again dividing 144 by 12 and I'm going to do it exactly how it will be done on the burroughs calculator so I'm going to enter in 12 and we're going to perform this operation on the left doing subtraction now the multiplication key on this calculator is pretty much exactly the same as the repeat key on the Burroughs so just keep in mind that so it doesn't clear my entry over here so what I need to do is think about when I subtract the number from these two digits what it's going to be and I know that I can do it once but if I do it again then it will be below zero this whole register that is and I will underflow the register that's not good and I can't do that so I know I can only press this once which means that my first digit is one after I've done that I know I need to move on to working with the second set of numbers and I can look at this and see oh I can do that twice so I will press the plunger twice and now it's all zeros if I go below zero I know I'm doing something wrong so I have to try and keep it above zero which is where the problem comes in on the burros because we can't see this register without printing out a number okay now we're going to apply the same subtraction principles to the burros like we did the bond but like the bond we actually get the results one digit at a time and this is far more complicated so we're going to have to write down what we get out of it as we do this so let's go ahead and start off by clearing our total register and working with a clean spot so we're going to do 144 divided by 12 just like before now we do have to keep in mind that this decimal or this comma here is actually a decimal point but that's not even the beginning of our issues okay let's start off by taking a look at what we can do so we need to start dividing this and we're going to start off by subtracting 12 from the leftmost columns we can see that we have 14 which means that we can only take 12 out once so we're going to do this we know that that's going to be a 1 so we're going to write down a 1 that will be the first digit of our answer so let's go ahead and do our subtractive process and there we go now this is where this sucks because we can't see the register so the only way to do this is to print a sum total that won't clear it remember and we can see we have 24 now we definitely can't take 12 out of 2 so we know we have to move on to the next column so we can look at this and we can see off that we'll go in 2 times we'll write down a 2 and then we'll run through this I will hold down repeat 1 2 and now we're done we will print the sum total and it didn't take it out I subtracted oh oh yeah okay so this is a fun thing here the repeat key doesn't repeat a subtraction it ejects set so you have to actually pull them that every time I forgot about that so I'll take out twelve two more times and palm that then I will print a sum total and it will be zero the joys of adding machine and adding machine quirks now this was an easy subtraction let's go ahead and do a more difficult one and to make sure we get the right answer I'm gonna do this first on my HP 12c so I want to know how many weeks there are on the air and there are 365 days in the year and there are seven days in a week and the answer should be 52 point one four this is actually configured to round to two digits but we'll just we'll go with that because you guys are good to see this is not gonna be fun but there are more digits this kind of goes off forever but that's our benchmark to hit so fifty two point one four so let's go ahead and try this out and because this is a non whole integer result we will have to pay attention to what the sum total is so let's start off by entering 365 print the sum total just to be sure okay let's begin so if we put seven in this column well we can't because that's a three so we know the first number is zero or not going to get a number there so we're going to move over 7 into 36 that will work but let's say I'm lazy and I don't want to do mental math well I know seven will go into 21 three times so let's go ahead and try that actually 7 will go into 28 four times so we'll do that seven repeat one two three four and let's see what the sum total is now it is eight so we can actually do it one more time seven - okay so I just did that in the wrong column cool so I'm going up add seven there now to undo that print sum total okay eight subtract seven from their bingo print the sum total and we can see we have 15 okay so we did this what five times that sounds about right okay now let's move on so we can do seven into this column now and we can see 15 7 times 2 is 14 so we know we're going to do it twice one two all right so we can do that and we also know that our decimal point is there now so let's go ahead and print our sum total and we have a 1 into 0 so we're going to continue this on we can't subtract 7 out of one so we're going to move over and subtract 7 out of 10 and we can do this a total of 1 times so we'll do this once and now we need to print our results we can see a 3 we can't subtract 7 out of 3 so we have to go over and now we can see that we have to do say 28 again because 7 times 4 actually that's the wrong area we have to move over one more repeat repeat and subtract 1 2 3 4 let's go ahead and print the total again to see where we're at and yep we can't take 7 out of 2 so there we go and this would just continue Han and on until we fill out this number but we'll go ahead and stop there and you can just see how this process would continue you would take your number out do your division and just keep going and just look at how much paper this prints I mean if I pull this up tear this off so we started out with 365 here this is all just to divide 365 by 7 this process is very slow and terrible but it is doable so we've done addition subtraction multiplication and division all on an adding machine from 1926 that is really cool I enjoy using these old devices and seeing what they're capable of I just I really like seeing how we've got to where we are and this is so raw it really does illustrate some of the fundamental concepts of how these things work but there are a few more things that we could still check out on this and one of them would be say the ribbons now I mentioned that this can't print in red and that's not entirely true what I've meant is that it has no capability of lifting the ribbons up now a true to color adding machine would move the ribbon up to print in a different color but this can't do that unless you force it to so if I want to say print three it's in black but if I pull this up and then print I can get it to print in red but it's not really designed to do that now I could also flip the spools over and do that but that's a lot of work to set up now I wouldn't have to remove these I just wanted to do that to the illustrates point of red so that's you know really a kind of useful feature to have on there it's just not designed for that I don't know if there were any plans available for this that would support a split color feature like that but it's totally possible I just I'm not sure but another thing about the platen is that I mentioned that there were wider ones now this one is the narrower platen that I believe was more common and you could believe that this one was meant for receipt usage and we can kind of demonstrate that but the wider platen it would have been to accept a full sized sheet of paper the option to use a full size sheet of paper would of course been used with a typewriter now this is a royal typewriter from about the same time period as my Burroughs adding machine here so this is a combination that could have actually existed now the reason you would want a full size platen on here is to be able to type up a document on here and then pull the sheet out and bring it over to the adding machine if you need to include calculations on it now since mine has the narrower platen I'm not really able to do that but one thing I can do is demonstrate how you might do the addition of a receipt on here and then add labels to what was purchased over here so let's go ahead and do that okay let's start to build up our seat so we're gonna go ahead and just leave a little bit of working space at the top or you could say print the stores name and let's start adding up an imaginary customer who came to the counter so let's say they bought a packet of seeds maybe that is 50 Cent's and let's say they want to order a couple of bags of stock feed so maybe those are like $4 each and they bought five bags all right and then maybe they're going to buy a new shovel and that is maybe six dollars so we can see how we just continue to add everything up and then when we get to the end we're going to do our final total and just for fun let's go ahead and pull this ribbon up to do this and print that and we have it in red hopefully you don't think you're supposed to do that but it is kind of fun so now we have our receipt and let's go ahead and pull this off and put it on our typewriter go ahead give us a little more working space now when you're working with a typewriter there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind the paper alignment you'll want to have set to zero most likely and then you need to have margins set so I'm gonna go ahead and bring these in to about what I would want to use the receipt with actually that won't go any over farther over so I'm gonna bring this over here and then align this over a bit more and I think that'll be good so let's go ahead and feed our paper in now this isn't going to feed in particularly well because it's kind of short but this will work out so all right now when we go over we are still within the bounds of the paper so we know we're going to stay on and when we tab over it will stop well it should have stopped the margin didn't exactly oh I have the margins cleared duh bring the margin over and we don't really want to go over our numbers let's set our margin there now there is our page and there is our right margin we can't go in farther and let's continue on so let's start off by making sure we have lines aligned here and we will want to do that by bringing this over and aligning to our numbers so I'm gonna unlock the platen readjust that and now that should strike about where our numbers are so the first thing we had our corn seeds so let's go ahead and bring this over and we'll say put locked and this typewriter isn't doing particularly great I need to do a little bit of a cleaning on this and try and get this working there we go alrighty and now we can see that's sort of a line that's not tremendous so I'm going to release that and bring this down a little bit for the next line but then we can continue on it's out there it's not aligning well anyway let's move on to the bags what was that those were that was animal feed all right bring this down one so let's say feed stock alright that T didn't work tremendously well there we go and we can just put ditto marks for the rest of those and there we are and one more what was that a and then let's go ahead and have some fun here and mark off our total perfect and this we might want to go past the right margin oh no you're supposed to release what maybe I should move it over oh yeah this is this what's not working tremendously well and we'll go over come back and do our total and there we are we have our printed receipt well I think that's about everything I can talk about for my bro's class 9 adding machine I really didn't plan on ever getting one of these but you know what I'm glad I did it's fun I know I don't want to have a whole bunch of adding machines but this one is unique enough I definitely think that it is cool and I'm glad I picked it up I hope that you guys enjoyed seeing one of these being fully put through its paces and being demonstrated as much as I possibly can if you want to see more stuff like this well I'm apparently going to talk about mechanical calculators a lot so you might want to keep hanging around if you want to support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it I'll see you next time

Channel: Tech Tangents

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Id: avqazTba1qI

Length: 58min 31sec (3511 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020