SCM Marchant 410 Electronic Desktop Calculator
Image Courtesy William Couch

The SCM/Marchant 410 is a later, lower cost version of the Marchant Cogito 412 calculator that has ten digits of capacity versus the twelve digits of the Cogito 412. The Marchant 410 also uses a more advanced Large Scale Integration chip set that drastically reduces the number of LSI chips required for the calculator to three, as opposed to eight for the Cogito 412. Otherwise, the Marchant 410 operates identically to the earlier calculator, shares identical keyboard, cabinet, and the wonderful Nixie tube display of the earlier Cogito 412 and 414 calculators. The main logic board of the Marchant 410 has quite a bit of wide-open space on it compared to the earlier machines due to the reduction in the number of ICs needed as well as the Nixie tube driver circuitry previously on the main board of the Cogito 412 being moved to a separate circuit board mounted behind the Nixie tube display.

Note that the Marchant 410 dropped the "Cogito" part of the name of the earlier calculators. It is not known for certain why this occurred, but it may have something to do with that all of SCM's earlier calculators carried this "Cogito" moniker, and perhaps product marketing folks thought that this labeling might associate the 410 with the earlier calculators, while it in fact the Marchant 410 was significantly more advanced from a technology perspective than the earlier COgito 412/Cogito 414 machines, even though it looked and functioned the same as the older calculators.

The various changes made to the Marchant 410 being significantly less-expensive than the earlier 412/414 calculators at introduction. The Marchant 410 was initially listed at a $510 MSRP in early 1972 shortly after it was introduced, and by April, that price had dropped to significantly to $385. This compares to introductory prices on the Marchant 412 of $795, and the Marchant 414 of $895. While the prices on the earlier calculators had dropped to over $400 by the time the Marchant 410 debuted, if one didn't need the added two or four digits of capacity of the older models, the Marchant 410 was still less expensive even though it was a newly-introduced calculator, and, it's price began falling within a few months of its introduction. This all shows how the intense competition in the electronic calculator marketplace was constantly driving manufacturers to continually reduce their manufacturing cost through improvements in IC technologies, reduction in the number of discrete components used, leveraging commonality (like keyboard and display subassemblies) between different models, and improving manufacturing processes.