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Old Calculator Museum Advertising & Documentation Archive

Andersen Laboratories, Inc. Advertisement
Electronics Magazine, August, 1966

Andersen Laboratories, Inc. was founded by Walther M. A. Andersen in 1950, as Walther M. A. Andersen & associates, initially located in Tariffville, CT. At some point, the company was renamed to Walther M. A. Andersen, Inc. The company relocated to West Hartford, CT for a time, then finally settled in Bloomfield, CT by the late 1960's.

The company was initially a manufacturer of delay line devices of varying types, including quartz and glass, torsional and longitudinal wire-based magnetostrictive delay lines, and inductor/capacitor delay circuits. Eventually the company also developed microwave delay lines used in digital point-to-point communications systems.

In 1989, the company was sold to a company called Alico, a newly formed corporation spawned out of New York-based Creative Electric. After the sale was completed in January of 1989, the company name was changed to Andersen Laboratories.

At the time, delay lines were a critical component in US Department of Defence and National Security Agency electronics systems, radar systems, computing systems, video systems, data terminals, and in various types of wired and wireless communications systems.

Andersen's business grew at a brisk pace, mainly as a result of lucrative government contracts, some of which were considered government or military secrets. As electronic calculators came into play, the company ended up making magnetostrictive delay lines under contract to Victor Comptometer (as well as perhaps some other electronic calculator manufacturers that remain to be discovered) used in Victor's second-generation 1400-series calculators, which included the Victor 14-321 and Victor 14-322. As an example of the advance of technology, a revision to the Victor 14-322 included replacing the delay line with a pair of early MOS shift register ICs at some point during the lifetime of the calculator.

It appears that Andersen Laboratories, Inc., was either shut down, renamed, or absorbed into some other company without retaining its identity at some point in the late 1990s.