Sony's New ICC-2500W Programmable Electronic Calculator
Early, 1970

A very marketing-centric article introducing Sony's ICC-2500W Programmable calculator. The article implies that an "average secretary" can program the calculator to perform functions such as invoicing, payroll, and other complex office functions, which is a bit of a stretch. Certainly, some training would be required in order to have the level of programming proficiency necessary in order to program the calculator for such office tasks, even for an exceptional secretary of the time. An average secretary of the time perhaps could use the programming capabilities of the calculator to perform basic, repetitive types of calculations such as discounting or mark-up calculations, but the complexities of a task such as payroll is non-trivial to program. Such a program would require the maintenance of a running payroll record for each employee; ability to perform table lookups for tax rates for both federal and state look up tax rates based on the pay rate of each employee and the number of exemptions each employee has claimed; calculate FICA wages and withholding; provide a means to enter miscellaneous deductions that would be separately tracked; and numerous other aspects of payroll that are programming tasks that would be beyond the scope of an average secretary. Not to dismiss the capabilities of a competent office secretary of the late 1960's, the article clearly was written by marketing people that were not beyond hyping the simplicity of programming the new calculator.

See the Old Calculator Museum's Exhibit for the Sony ICC-2550W Programmable Electronic Calculator, a follow-on to the ICC-2500W offering more than double the number of programming steps as well as a magnetic card reader/writer that allowed programs to be loaded and stored on magnetic cards, meaning that programs would not have to be keyed in by hand each time they were needed.