SCM Marchant 221

This is a preview of an upcoming exhibit for the SCM Marchant 221.

This SCM Marchant 221 was made in mid-1973, at a time when the calculator market was undergoing tremendous change, and with it, intense competition. The beginnings of the big shakeout in the industry were beginning to be felt by all in the industry. and price competition was fierce. The sure-fire way to reduce the cost of a calculator was to reduce the number of components it's made of. And...the best way to reduce the number of components was to rely on higher levels of integration, cramming more and more into the chips. Large-Scale Integration (LSI) calculators of the time generally utilized four to six chips, and still had quite a number of discrete components for display driving, power supply, and clock-generation circuitry. The SCM 221 makes use of a two-chip calculator chip set that was designed to minimize the number of external components, thus reducing the parts count, and cost.