The ANITA Mark VII and ANITA Mark VIII calculators were launched simultaneously in late 1961 as the world's first all-electronic desktop calculators. Designed and built by the Bell Punch Co. in Britain, and marketed through its Sumlock Comptometer division, they used vacuum tubes and cold-cathode switching tubes in their logic circuits and nixie tubes for their numerical displays. They were the first of a series of desktop and hand-held electronic calculators that the company was to develop and sell under the ANITA name into the mid-1970s.
History of ANITA calculators The acronym ANITA was officially proclaimed to be derived from, variously, A New Inspiration to Arithmetic, or A New Inspiration to Accounting, though there have been rumours that this was also the name of the designer's wife. The Bell Punch Company (named after its first product, a ticket punch with a bell used by tram and bus conductors) had been producing a very successful range of key-driven mechanical calculators of the Comptometer type under the names "Plus" and "Sumlock", since the 1930s. In 1956 the young graduate Norbert Kitz (also known as Norman Kitz), who had worked on the early British Pilot ACE computer project, had a chance meeting with some of the directors of Control Systems Ltd., of which the Bell Punch Company was then a subsidiary. Some years earlier, while researching the introduction to his dissertation, he was looking at the mechanical calculators in the Science Museum, London, United Kingdom, and had realised that the future of calculators lay in electronics. Unfortunately, the major mechanical calculator manufacturers were far away in the US and Germany, and Kitz's idea lay dormant until he raised it at that meeting. The directors were very forward looking and were impressed by Kitz and his idea. They decided to open an Electronics Development Department, and took on Kitz as the leader of a project to develop an electronic version of the company's mechanical calculators. To help confidentiality the project was given the code-name ANITA. Since the company had production lines capable of manufacturing precision mechanical parts by the thousand, the first experimental models were mechanical and electronic hybrids. However, these proved impractical and a purely electronic design was pursued. Being the first in the field there were several major technical areas that required considerable development:
The electronic circuits for the four arithmetic functions: add, subtract, multiply, divide. An electronic circuit which could store numbers being used in the calculation without taking up a lot of space and requiring a lot of power. A suitable keyboard to enter the numbers of a calculation. This had to have a long life and also give good electrical reliability. A suitable numerical output to display the results.
However, the main constraint was to be the cost of the calculator. The cheapest electronic computer then cost approximately £50,000 GBP but to be competitive with mechanical calculators the target selling price of the electronic calculator was in the range £350 to £400. The first all-electronic prototype was demonstrated to the board of the company in December 1958. This prototype was later donated by the company to the Science Museum in London, where Kitz had originally had the idea for the electronic calculator. It has been on display surrounded by the mechanical calculators that it was to make obsolete. There then followed several years of great effort in finding electronic and mechanical components suitable for production, testing them for suitability, and where necessary producing them within the company or finding someone to produce them to their specification. The great culmination of all the effort was revealed in October 1961, when the world's first all-electronic desktop calculators were launched. These were the ANITA Mk VIII at the Business Efficiency Exhibition in London, United Kingdom, from 2 to 11 October, and the ANITA Mk VII at the Hamburg Business Equipment Fair, Germany, from 10 to 13 October.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
