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News Archive - Report on Hayakawa Electric (Sharp) Marketing Electronic Calculators Using ICs


IC-based Electronic Calculators Under Development at Hayakawa Electric (Sharp)
Electronics Magazine, January, 23, 1967

A brief article stating that Hayakawa Electric (Sharp) is working on the development of integrated circuit-based electronic calculators using bipolar IC's from Mitsubishi (which first ended up being used in the Sharp Compet 31 (CS-31A), which came to market in February of 1967, just shortly after this article was published.

Also mentioned was the use of Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuits manufactured by Nippon Electric Co. (NEC). which first appeared in the Sharp Compet 16 introduced in December, 1967.

Sharp was not the first to use Integrated Circuits in an electronic calculator (that distinction goes to Victor Comptometer in the US, with the large-scale MOS IC chip set made by General Micro-electronics providing the logic for the Victor 3900), but Sharp was an early pioneer in the use of Japanese-made integrated circuits in their electronic calculators, and once bitten by the IC bug, jumped headlong into the development of calculators that used increasingly fewer discrete electronic components.