Anthony Dorey: Calculations- the Calculator

"The accountants had a great load of girls who operated comptometers. I found it very aggravating that there were these girls doing all this adding and subtracting for the finance lot and we had nothing to help us to do all the adding and subtracting which we had to do. About 1955 I discovered that electro-magnetic calculators were beginning to appear, so I persuaded my boss to buy one. It was just a machine which could add, subtract, multiply and divide up to, I think, about 5 figures. So you could get accuracy to 5 significant figures instead of the old slide rule which could give you 3 significant figures. It was a great step forward. All these miserable calculations which we had to do could be done a lot quicker and more accurately."