We have had the latest typewriter to join the collection, a Silver-Reed Leader II, for a couple of weeks now. The first impressions were that it was a very good typewriter in an almost as new condition, and second impressions back that up. Indeed, if it wasn't for the ribbon being almost worn out then it feels like the typewriter has been hardly ever used. An excellent addition to the collection therefore. but obviously it does need a new ribbon!
Everyone has heard of the Yellow Pages of course and is used to letting their fingers do the walking. Inside the telephone directory there was also the Green Pages! These pages listed the products and services available from the General Post Office Telecommications. These included the various kinds of telephone you could rent, special services such as radiophones and the very far-sighted confravision. A selection of pages from the Birmingham 1980 directory is below.
As well as the typewriter, some calculators also have keys which have some sort of esoteric mysterious function which we will examine in this new series. Lets start with the lozenge! Not all calculators have this key, those that do in my collection are some of the larger mains powered printer calculators which are designed for heavy duty number crunching.
So, what does this key mean? Quite simply the lozenge means subtotal, important when you are doing the wages on a Friday morning for example. A couple of examples from our collection:
On the Silver-Reed 1250PD at least, a lozenge is generated on the print out when you press the lozenge key. Unfortunately i can't tell if this is also done on the other printer calculators i have yet as they all need new ribbons!
The Casio J-1 was a nice chunky handheld calculator from about 1978. The calculator had the basic four arithmetic functions as well as square roots, percentages, negative numbers and a memory. The cancel buttons are a rather nice orange while the others are white, black and beige. A very late 1970s colour scheme and quite frankly wonderful.
The J-1 had a NEC D1877C processor and an eight digit VFD display. Our one seems to work pretty well.
