Olivetti Logos 27-2
It's a electro-mechanical calculator, from around 1967, probably the highest point ever reached in the development of electromechanical calculators, as well as one of the most complex consumer devices ever built.
It is made up of several thousand pieces, assembled in such a way as to perform all the arithmetic operations.
Here, in fact, the calculations are not performed by electronic components as in current electronic calculators.
Even if it seems strange, the calculations are performed by mechanical parts, assisted in their movements by a powerful electric motor.
However, in the 60s was emerging a market situation in which electronic devices, simpler and less expensive, were increasingly establishing themselves on the market.
Therefore the big effort of Olivetti to insist on this line of mechanical products, with production lines, special machinery, staff training, assistance, arrived too late and proved to be useless.
It is a calculator that contains non-trivial innovations that cannot be found on any other electromechanical calculator, even from other brands.
And Olivetti believed a lot in the project, since was planned a plan of six models, which never saw the light.
The calculator, in the final version, included functions such as automatic square, automatic percentage, automatic download of the partial total on one of the two operating memories, automatic rounding, automatic transfer of partial results to the second totalizer, floating point.
All this was done with mechanical solutions, therefore of incredible complexity.
For maintenance, it was necessary to be able to access the machine from all six sides.
And so there was also a special table for maintenance, which allowed you to turn the machine around to look at it from all sides.
It is said that the maintenance courses for this calculator were terrible, you had to understand the detailed functioning of the machine so piece by piece, what it was for, what it did, the adjustments, and therefore what the relationship between piece and piece had to be, if there had to be a space of a few tenths of millimetre, how much the pieces had to be in contact, if it was an area that had to be lubricated with grease, with oil, the relative timing of the pieces, etc.
Here you can see this calculator, how it works and some of its story.
Its ancestor was the Olivetti Logos 27-1.
The main difference between them is the number of totalizers, which in the 27-1 is only one totalizer, while in the 27-2 it's two totalizers.
The Olivetti 27-1 was released in 1965, immediately showing problems of operation due to its complexity.
With the Olivetti 27-2 was made an attempt to solve the problems manifested in the previous model by redesigning some details, however without any real improvement.
Here a video about the Olivetti Logos 27-2
