ASCOTA 170
The mechanical computer from 1955
IF YOU WERE REDIRECTED, SCROLL DOWN!!!
You might be surprised why I am suddenly talking about adding machines on this website. It is a newly found subject I am eager to explore, and I figured it might be fun to do it together with all of you. I love electronics for the fact that it is easily interconnective. It is really easy to build something complex simply by mashing simple subcircuits together to solve a difficult task. But this method of designing also obscures the true art engineers possessed back in the ol' days: solving difficult tasks with little components and heavy design restraints.
In the modern world we have microprocessors, and our goal is to turn any physical interaction into something digital as efficiently as possible. That way stuff can be tied together quickly with code by a couple programmers, and it simplifies the designing process. As a con, this also makes modern electronics significantly more unreliable. The physical components are smaller, making them having a smaller life expectancy, there's also way more of them, meaning that theres more links in the chain where one can fail. But analog electronics isn't the only way to accomplish a complicated task with fairly little means... there was a time where solving problems mechanically was also a very viable option! Allow me to take you back to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany) in the 50's 'till the 80's and before!
Before the time electronics weren't very miniaturized, complicated tasks were almost exclusively done by mechanical systems. Things like vacuum tubes and early transistors were notoriously expensive, and sometimes fairly unreliable when used on a large scale. You'd often see that large electronic computers of the time spent a fair amount of time not being in operation because a vacuum tube burnt out. For critical applications, they sometimes built two, so they could quickly switch back and forth between the one that worked and the other that had to be repaired. This resulted in a fruitful environment where mechanical calculators could develop into very complicated, but relatively reliable and affordable machines. One of these machines was called the "Ascota 170". Maybe one of the most versatile mechanical computers to be ever commercialized! This machine was sold as a "buchungsmaschine", a bookkeeping machine. These were built for small businesses to... bookkeep! These bookkeeping machines could run small programs to perform a complex mathematical task, and tabellize a result. Multiple programs could be made by request at the manufacturer, and were hot-swappable. These machines are pretty similar to the program "Excel" nowadays, and are fully Turing-complete! And whilst for some reason, on the internet it is pretty popular to hate on engineering east from the iron curtain, I think it has something magical. These engineers really knew how get as much function out of as little parts as possible. This machine is a perfect example... and at a price of a Trabant! When one popped up closeby in Germany, I got a friend of mine excited enough to join into that project of acquiring and restoring an Ascota 170.
During my research, I came across Wim Hasselo. A specialist in mechanical calculators and photographer, with an incredibly well documented collection. He happened to have made efforts tackling these monsters, and I went to ask for advice. With this being my first steps into the world of mechanical calculators, he gave me prescious advice: fathom an Ascota 110-4e, before you tackle the 170. The mechanism behind the keyboard and printing system are similar, the arithmatics unit is exactly the same! So that's exactly what I did intended to do! I ordered an 110, my buddy and I jumped in the car, drove past the Ruhr-area and pick up the 170 using our... rough... German speaking abilities, drove past Wim to see these mechanisms operate in person together with a great explanation (which I'll further discuss down below), and went back home to completely ignore his advice and starting to dismantle the 170 in a destructive wave of excitement:
Ouch!! I like to think of myself to be a clever guy every now and then, but it is usually immediately followed by shooting myself in the foot. Atleast we took pictures of the dissasembling process, but how about we go back to square one, and actually follow up the advice I received... lets make ourselves a little bit more acquainted first with the Ascota 110!
FURTHER!!!
A quick introduction
Germany absolutely is the number one place to get yourself a mechanical calculator in Europe. People seem to have held onto a TON of them, and there seems to be a lot of German brands in general. They're cheap and easy to find, a lot of sellers seem to use PayPal, and with a little bit of luck they're willing to ship the calculator to you! I tried to find the cheapest Ascota 110-4e to mess around with, and take apart. This resulted in an old listing from late 2019 with the calculator I needed for only 30 euros including shipping to the Netherlands... what a steal! The pictures looked grainy and blurred in such way it appeared the photographer sneezed whilst taking the picture. The machine looked a bit crummy too, so I hoped to receive a beaten up calculator in a poor enough condition where I wouldn't feel guilty for dissasembling it... Boy-o-boy was I wrong! Whilst the calculator was really dusty, and the original cover had a mould problem, the machine behind the dust was in almost brand-new condition! An hour worth of scrubbing and elbow grease shows the following transformation:
Operating principle keyboard
I am not well acquainted with the terminology around mechanical calculators. Therefore I'll be keeping one eye pointed towards Wim's explanation (in the left menu, click "rocking segment" under the "calculating technologies" tab), whilst trying to come up with my own explanation.
Due to the holidays I'm taking a break with most projects. Therefore content won't be added to this page for a while! 17-07-2022
A BIG UPDATE!
Soooooo yikes... 13-09-2024 it is at the time of writing... I now see I got a bit lazy writing the "operating principle keyboard" tab. My interest is still there, but I got naïve thinking to quickly specialize into everything. My story around bookkeeping machines is not over yet, BUT, there's many great people doing a better job at documenting. Go look at his website nevertheless, it's maybe one of the best resources out there on the internet when it comes to mechanical calculators. But yeah... we did work on the Ascota 170, we got it to loop, printer worked, got almost everything going except for a couple jams. But life can be a tough nut to crack every now and then, long story short we had to get rid of the Ascota, realistically better today than tomorrow.
This was an event I was very scared of, our contact Wim had two but told us it was completely impossible for him to find someone interested to take them off his hands resulting in two examples being pressed into a cube. I figured, due to them being so big, heavy but obscure in the West, nobody really has attached any sentimental value to these machines. Besides, many computer museums in the area solely specialize in home computers from the 70s and newer, so it is not within their scope anyways. I eventually recalled I once went to a great computer museum in Katowice, Poland... what was it again... alas, it's put on display there. I wanted to write an extensive LinkedIn post, but once it turned into a 3 page essay, I figured I'd post it here and link the traffic towards this section of the webpage... whoops! Here's the full story:
IM SORRY , PLEASE READ FROM HERE!!!
Modern-day computing
Over the past century, I think we are all very aware of the incredible revolution that has been going on in the field of automation. One of the great contributors to this progress is the turbulent development of the “computer”. Nowadays, in our progressively more digital world, whenever someone mentions the word “computer”, many will picture either a desktop PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, maybe a microcontroller or PLC.
Life before accessible IC technology
Of course, life wasn’t always this convenient where now, for a minor investment any engineer can personally own the computing power equivalent to all supercomputers existing during the 1980s combined to watch YouTube videos and play videogames on. Semiconductors were either non-existent or horribly expensive and large. Miniaturization and power consumption were of little to no priority. Despite many jobs we’d nowadays do with a PC, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians used to have dedicated calculation tools like slide rules and table books for calculations, simulated using scale models, or sometimes perhaps relied on gut feel and trial-and-error for an iterative approach which worked just as well. Under these restrictions, computer technology needed to be flexible (hardware-wise), meaning whatever computers people did have, came in many different shapes and sizes. Computers were simply optimized to operate with whatever knowledge and technology was at hand at the current place and time, for whatever task they had to fulfil.
Alternatives
Of course there were mechanical binary systems like Konrad Zuse’s Z1, electronic ones using valves like Atanasoff and Berry’s ABC. Programmable analog computers also existed using gears and disc-and-wheel integrators to solve differential equations like Hartree and Porter’s differential analyser built from Meccano. Water-powered computers like Lukyanov’s integrator or Phillip’s MONIAC also sporadically emerged. Electronic versions using valves were mass-produced soon after like Heathkit’s H1 for students to mess around with, and due to the inherent low part count and high “processing speeds” of analog computers, incredibly powerful systems could later be produced in the germanium and silicon age such as the Telefunken RA 770, allowing for the simulation from car suspensions to orbital mechanics. EAI even managed to build hybrid computers between both technologies! More obscure systems existed as well like Brusentsov’s Setun, using a ternary-based system. The Harwell computer, which was almost completely built from dekatrons and telephone exchange relays, used the decimal system. But in Germany, a country famous for its history in fine mechanical engineering, there was a fertile breeding ground for another interesting approach towards computing.
The buchungsmaschine
Or… bookkeeping machine. The story of the Ascota 170 starts with two companies, Astra and Wanderer. During industrialization, businesses grew bigger and bigger, resulting in financial departments having to crunch more numbers more reliably in a smaller time-span. This resulted in many companies feeling the urge to improve the throughput of their mechanical calculators. In the early 1920’s Astra specialized in designing the very first input methods using mechanical matrices rather than earlier systems using either 5 or 10 buttons per digit (this development is the reason calculators still arrange numbers from 1-9 in a 3x3 grid!), thus improving calculation speed by the user and a lower likelihood of making mistakes. During the same time-period, Wanderer focussed primarily on automating a series of recurrent simple calculations through the use of a “program” and printing them on specified locations on a page like a mechanical version of Excel. After a bit of evolution of both companies, these developments resulted throughout the following decades in Astra’s model B, Klasse 1, Klasse 0, and most notably, the Klasse 110, and Wanderer’s Continental Klasse 700, 800 and 900, and later the rebranded Optimatic 900. Due to the popularity of these machines with small companies due to the affordability, these machines were called bookkeeping machines. Wanderer was not the only player in this field!
(This photo is from Wim as well, if you click on the photo, it takes you to the Astra page, please please please have a look at the other calculators as well, he did a gorgeous job taking pictures of them)
The merge of two companies and a bunch of rebrandings
At this part of the timeline, I quite boldly skipped over WWII. Both companies, being highly specialized in fine mechanics, were ordered to contribute to the arms production for Nazi Germany. Due to the importance and high demand for the products they produced, development quickly continued after the war in now East Germany. In 1953, after a botched merge between the bookkeeping machine division Wanderer (Continental) and Astra into the company “VEB Büromaschinenwerk” in Chemnitz, Wanderer’s employees did not want to chip in to produce Astra’s lineup of calculators, so the division moved to Erfurt to eventually go bankrupt, leaving the rebranded Astra with the duty to continue the line of bookkeeping machines. The city of Chemnitz got rebranded in 1954 into Karl-Marx-Stadt, thus the company also had to be rebranded to “VEB Buchungsmaschinenwerk Karl-Marx-Stadt”. Using the programmability of the Optimatic 900 and the adding and input mechanism of the Astra Klasse 110, a significantly more powerful and flexible buchungsmaschine was developed called the Astra Klasse 120, 130, 140, 150. In 1953 a prototype was launched, and in 1955, of the Klasse 170, which the latter in 1959 got rebranded to Ascota 170 due to trademark issues around the name “Astra” (later after being merged with VEB Robotron, it got rebranded into Daro 170 but alas….).
The Ascota 170
So there it is! The buchungsmaschine designed and mass-produced since 1955, The beautiful Ascota 170. The one shown below was our own specimen!
Now, in my opinion, this is quite an incredible machine. Partly because of the high flexibility and usefulness, partly because of all the expansions and research that was put in to make it even better, partly due to the sophisticated mechanics whilst remaining reliable, partly because of how far forward its topology already is, but mostly because this is one of the rare examples where a computer managed to make its way outside of scientific research and defence simply because how affordable it was!
Due to the mechanical nature, of course, the clock rate of the machine was not very high (in the order of single Hz). So instead of the most important trend in digital computing, trying to raise the clock rate as much as possible, these engineers were directly facing drastic optimization issues in the topology of the processor itself. It meant that this was a decimal-based computer, capable of natively working with numbers 12 decimals wide (41 bit !!!!), it could run two programs simultaneously with separate ALUs, effectively meaning it had “multiple cores”, it used a busbar which could be externally interfaced with to access external memory (punched tape and punched cards) or coprocessors. These coprocessors could be time-shared, running multiple Ascota’s on a single co-processing module. Depending on the size of your wallet, you could buy an additional 50 registers (in increments of 10). Programs were easily swappable. Compared to the Optima discussed earlier, this machine also had a lot of extra control logic, meaning programming was significantly easier despite presumably losing out on a bit of pipelining capability.
All of this functionality for the price of a new Trabant or about an annual salary, something a small business could afford in 1955. Hence over 300.000 units were made and were sold in 101 different countries.
Ascota’s aftermath
Now, in 1978, VEB Buchungsmaschinenwerk Karl-Marx-Stadt was eventually merged with Robotron. The machine was further produced into 1983 under the name “Daro” until it was pushed out of production to make place for more modern digital systems. Due to the economic turmoil in the Eastern Bloc during the 80s, followed by the reunification of East and West Germany, Robotron, like many other companies, was privatized, partitioned, bought up by external companies, putting an end to the legacy of the brand and it’s achievements.
But…
As in all fields of engineering, people sometimes forget how often we reinvent the wheel by refusing to look back into the past every once and a while! This is why we have museums and why there are many people trying to keep this history alive! These machines are rare, together with my friend, Matthijs Bakker, we actually managed to find one and put in some effort to get it running again. We got help from Wim Hasselo, an expert in the field of mechanical calculators, and the resources from the website of Robotron-Technik (historical database) and Arifru (someone who actually managed to get one up and running again), we got inspired to take on this project. Sadly we had to let go of the machine about two years later due to personal circumstances. In a hurry, I went on to find the ideal place to hand the machine to…
Which was the Muzeum Historii Komputerów i Informatyki: MHKI in Katowice!
So if you want to see this gorgeous piece of history and you are into computer history, not only are they specialized in home computers in working condition which you can interact with, but they also have obscure systems of Polish production together with working mainframes.
I would like to thank Krzystof for accepting the offer into your beautiful collection and keeping contact, and Sergiusz for staying late in order to receive the machine and working out the paperwork such that we can guarantee for as long the museum exists, the Ascota will live on as well!!
Best regards everyone,
Mareijn van Dijk
Here it is, on display, our Ascota, in a museum, an educational tool for everyone to see!
