Welcome to the Old Calculator Web Museum, the oldest continually operating calculator-related museum website on the Internet, online since 1997 (27 years).

Let me briefly introduce myself. I am Rick Bensene, the owner and curator of this museum. The museum is located in a rural area on the distant outskirts of a tiny town called Beavercreeek, Oregon. The museum is located approximately 26 miles South-East (by road) of Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon. The physical museum contains all of the calculators & related equipment exhibited online, as well as many more calculators that have not yet had exhibit pages prepared. The museum also contains some vintage computers, ranging from a 1972-vintage Digital Equipment PDP 8/e, to the early microcomputer systems. As much as possible, all items exhibited in the online museum are in operational condition, and are on display in the physical museum in such a way that they can be powered up and operated by visitors to the museum.

My background is in Information Technology, a line of work that I've been professionally working in for nearly 47 years. Primarily, I have made a name for myself by taking IT infrastructures that are unreliable, insecure, poorly-performing, improperly maintained, with outdated hardware and operating systems, and elatively quickly transforming them into smooth-running, rock-solid reliable, secure, high-performance, current, and properly maintained environments.

I had a fascination with numbers from very eary in my life. When I had the opportunity to see and experience an electronic calculator for the first time (A Friden 130 sometime in 1965), that fascination for numbers transformed into a passion for any electronic device that could process numbers. Once I began working in the mid-1970's, I would haunt thrift stores, swap meets, yard/garage sales, classified ads in the newspaper, and antique shops looking for old electronic calculators. I chose early electronic calculators because they were much more affordable than old computers of that time, and took up a lot less space.

The online museum pages focus on content, without a lot of the distrations that so many web pages have nowadays. The pages are written directly in basic HTML to avoid all of the overhead of website authoring systems. Some may find the pages primitive, but they are the way they are so that the focus is on the content rather than razzle-dazzle. The museum is funded entirely out of my own pocket, so you won't find advertising, pop-ups, and the like that simply clutter up the web pages, and are more often than not, a waste of bandwidth.

The Old Calculator Museum is devoted to preserving, documenting, and sharing the history and technology of desktop electronic calculators, as well as early portable electronic calculators from the very beginnings in the early 1960's through the start of what became the pocket calculator in the early 1970's. Much of the technology that we enjoy today, such as personal computers, smart phones, tablets, gaming systems, digital still/video cameras, and just about anything else that is uses electronics, has a microprocessor "brain" in it that has embedded in its electronic genetics the technologies that came to be as a direct result of the development of the electronic calculator.

For more information about the museum, please see the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

The Old Calculator Museum is always looking for old electronic calculators of interest. If you have an old calculator that was made between 1960 and 1974, the museum may be interested in making it a part of the collection. For more information about specific machines the museum is interested in acquiring, see the WANTED page.

If you have an old calculator which seems to fit these interests and are looking for a new home for it, please send an EMail with information about your calculator.

Click in any of the "displays" to jump to the areas indicated.

Calculators in the Museum