SCM Smith Corona Marchant memorabilia
Company: Smith-Corona Marchant (SCM) Based: Syracuse, New York Founded: in 1958, when Smith-Corona aquired Merchant Calculator Co. Specialty: A major manufacturer of electronic typewriters, copiers, and calculators |
SCM Merchant 1 Electronic Calculator (1971)
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SCM Marchant Cogito Desktop Calculator First MOS LSI Chip (1969)
Item #1025
Smith-Corona was a major manufacturer of advanced mechanical type calculators up until the 1960's when they moved into making electronic calculators by their acquisition of the Marchant Calculator Company.
They would exit the electronic calculator busines shortly there after in 1973, due to a highly saturated market with numerous competitors including Sharp, Canon, Craig, Sanyo, Bowmar, Rapid Data, Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, Digitrex, and Comodore. This market competetion, especially from the growing number of Japanese manufacturers, caused the prices of caluclators to plunge.
This Lucite paperweight from SCM features a gold and white ceramic Integrated Circuit with grey-traces, in a 40-lead CDIP package. The round cavity around the die is absent the top lid, which would have been gold plated and marked with the IC part number and manufacturer datecode. Viewing of the chip and gold wire bonding is posible in this unfinished state. This was one of the chips made for SCM by American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI) that would have been used in the Marchant Cogito desktop calculator 414 and 412 models.
The Cogito calculators used eight MOS "Super MOS" LSI chips made by AMI to perform the calculators logic functions. SCM Marchant was the first American manufacturer to produce an electronic desktop calculator using MOS LSI Integrated Circuits.
The Cogito 414 desktop calculator had a 14-digit Nixie tube display, and the 412 model had a 12-digit display.
SCM Cogito electronic calculator (1968)
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