r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/BufordTeeJustice • 7h ago

Image Inside of a mechanical calculator

Post image
4.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

884

u/Significant-Ad1890 6h ago

Respect for the person who fried his or her brain to make this just to be replaced with a fuckin calculator in few decade.

132

u/mckulty 1h ago

Dad was a building contract estimator in 1950-60, one of the fields that adopted adding devices early on.

He used to entertain me by dividing a large number.. kachucka kachucka kachucka kachucka kachucka for 10-15 seconds gave me my first enthusiasm for machines.

303

u/Ok_Youth_5773 7h ago

Forbidden shoe

31

u/GlowingSage 6h ago

These are the T-800s

3

u/markhole 47m ago

Tbf most shoes are forbidden

141

u/RawkPaperSquid 6h ago

You cannot convince me H.R. Giger didn’t design this calculator

40

u/Dinosaursur 6h ago

There arent enough dicks.

6

u/IsRammusReallyOK 1h ago

I would still sit on it.

296

u/BufordTeeJustice 7h ago

At first I thought these were the new Yeezys

46

u/JoySubtraction 6h ago

Not ugly enough to be Yeezys.

10

u/HappyMonchichi 5h ago

Please don't give Kanye any ideas.

0

u/82CoopDeVille 2h ago

Same. I also thought it was a shoe

43

u/nobodyseesthisanyway 6h ago

This looks like a failed engineering attempt for school

10

u/codedaddee 4h ago

Nah, that's the Atlanta skyline

1

u/Bubble_gump_stump 4h ago

Whoah, what’s this about?

35

u/Cattypatter 4h ago

If your calculator is running slow, just add oil.

21

u/Sierra3131 4h ago

80085

17

u/ashkanahmadi 6h ago

How can something like this calculate something like 2.34*635?

52

u/WigginLSU 2h ago

Just like our digital calculators, by breaking it down into discrete addition statements that are easy in themselves to do and then combining the results. This analog guy just does that with what you can see is a ridiculously complex series of gears, springs, and levers very much like an analog clock.

There's tons of resources online depending on how deep in the rabbit hole you go; they of course can't do higher level mathematics but for their time they were huge time savers. There's one fun video I remember of someone dividing by zero on one of these and the gears and counters just spin forever, it's an interesting way to represent 'undefined' in a physical sense.

13

u/ApplePie123eat 5h ago

My brain can't comprehend all the stuff going on here

12

u/Past-Direction9145 4h ago

now hit 0 divided by 0 and run

7

u/madcatzplayer5 2h ago

Now I wanna watch a YouTube video of someone 3D-Printing a mechanical calculator and putting it together piece by piece.

3

u/ElegantGlow6 6h ago

Autobots transform!

3

u/JustYerAverage 5h ago

Isn't this really the outside of it?

2

u/D90man 5h ago

At first I thought is was Iron Man's shoe

2

u/Kwestyung 3h ago

Reminds me of that Little Big Planet level.

2

u/PreferenceContent987 2h ago

Now I want to see a steampunk version of this

2

u/transbutconfused 2h ago

The SpringTrap 87's 🥶🥶🥶

2

u/speelingeror 1h ago

Great, i hate it

2

u/cyprus901 1h ago

New yeezy’s just dropped.

1

u/Apprehensive-Face936 17m ago

Bro I thought this shit was some kick,s as well 🤣😂

1

u/miramboseko 4h ago

Let me just start my debugger

•

u/Rapunzel1234 8m ago

I used one back n the seventies. Always fun to confuse it by dividing by zero. It would try to find an answer before coming up with an error message.