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Final Engineering Report on the Friden EC-130 Magnetostrictive Delay Line
June, 1964
This document, dated June of 1964, is an engineering report on the design and construction of the Magnetostrictive Delay Line used in the Friden EC-130 electronic calculator. The delay line is the device in the calculator that provides the storage for the working registers of the machine, including the four level RPN stack, and the Store/Recall Memory register. The report goes into great technical detail on the materials, methods, testing and design considerations that went into the development of the delay line.
Friden used magnetostrictive delay lines in all of its in-house developed electronic calculators with the exception of the Friden 1155 and 1155A calculators, which utilized MOS shift register memory. There were design changes along the way, with the EC-130 and EC-132 using the delay line as described in the document, but the 115x-series printing calculators, and the 116x-series CRT-display calculators eliminated one of the magnetostrictive tapes after it was determined that a single tape could impart a large-enough torque twist, and receive it at the other end. This change reduced the cost of the delay line, and also made it easier to fabricate.