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Sanyo ICC-0161 "Mini" Calculator

Sanyo ICC-0161
Image Courtesy Gerard Timmerman

The Sanyo ICC-0161 was Sanyo's first so-called "Mini" electronic calculator. It was also Sanyo's first electronic calculator to utilize large scale integrated circuit technology, with a four-chip LSI chipset providing all of the logic of the calculator. Initial production of the ICC-0161 calculator used LSI chips designed and fabricated by General Instrument in the US for Sanyo, as at the time, Sanyo did not have facilities to fabricate chips of this level of complexity. Usually these General Instrument-produced chips will have SANYO printed on them with a smaller General Instrument (GI) logo. ICC-0161 calculators with chips so-marked are generally earlier production machines.

Later, Sanyo developed the production facilities to fabricate the chips themselves under license from General Instrument, and these chips would have only SANYO printed on them. The LSI integrated circuits made it possible to dramatically shrink the size of a 16-digit calculator from Sanyo's earlier-generation of small-scale integration desktop calculators such as the ICC-162.

The ICC-0161 was a basic four function calculator with fixed decimal settings that was an AC-power only machine despite its portable size. The display consisted of sixteen individual gas-discharge seven-segment display tubes, each with a right-hand decimal point. The Sanyo ICC-0161 is likely to be the smallest sixteeen digit electronic calculator produced.

Note that the most-significant display tube in the pictured IC-0161 is not operational.


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