Sanyo ICC-82D Mini Calculator (1^st design)

Sanyo Electronics Company (Japan) entered the market of portable, electronic calculators already in May 1970 with the ICC-82D (Integrated Circuit Calculator). This "Mini Calculator" with rechargeable NiCd batteries lists in one line with:

In the time of its introduction, the ICC-82D - and its twin Dictaphone 1680 - was the smallest portable electronic calculator with display on the market. 

The unusual combination of Nixie tubes and a rechargeable battery for a portable calculator was only a temporary solution. The second design of the ICC-82D was introduced in January 1971 together with the ICC-0081 and used amber colored gas-discharge tubes with the common seven-segment layout. The main differences between the two calculators are the power supply. While the ICC-0081 sports a built-in AC adaptor for the rechargeable batteries, uses the original ICC-82D an external AC adaptor.

Within a few months engineers at Sanyo managed it to squeeze the four chip design of the ICC-82D into a package barely larger than the later Texas Instruments Datamath and introduced the incredible ICC-804D, a.k.a. Dictaphone 1681.

Dismantling this early ICC-82D manufactured in October 1970 reveals a clean and robust design based on four integrated circuits with SANYO LM8001, LM8002, LM8003, and LM8004 markings clocked at 0.07 MHz. These chips were manufactured under license of General Instruments Corp., together with Rockwell and Texas Instruments one of the pioneers in the development of LSI circuits (Large-Scale-Integration) in MOS technology. Please remember the "pairing" of calculator manufacturers in Japan and their sources for the MOS-LSI chips in the United States in the 1969-1971 time frame:

Please read more about early calculator chips in the CPU-Galaxy Museum established in October 2008 by collector Peter Nusser in Austria. The Sanyo ICC-82D (1^st design) is featured in the Exhibition "Complete Systems".

One advantage of the SANYO chip-set is the internal capacity of 16 digits allowing e.g. the multiplication of two 8 digit numbers. Calculation time is about 0.4 seconds.

Performing basic calculations is somewhat unusual: