Royal IC-130

An item I’d ordered from an ebay seller arrived in a sturdy wooden case with metal catches and a leather handle. The case gives the appearance of having been custom-made for its contents. It’s about the right size and shape to have contained a compact mid-20th Century typewriter, and, as it happens, the object within carries a “Royal” badge, Royal having been a major American typewriter manufacturer. Inside the case are several precisely-shaped and carefully-positioned pieces of foam rubber to cradle its contents, not a typewriter but a different kind of office machine: a calculator.

While the “Royal” badge is on the front of the machine, elsewhere it’s marked “Imperial Typewriter Company, Leicester, United Kingdom”. This isn’t altogether a contradiction, as, by the time this calculator was made (ca. 1972), both the Royal and Imperial brands had been absorbed by the same parent company: Litton Industries. Although there’s no mention of it anywhere on the device, the Royal IC-130 would have been manufactured in Japan, rather than the US or UK.

Its green VFD display dates back to a point in time when the problem of selectively un-illuminating individual digits hadn’t yet been solved. As a workaround, unused leading digit positions always contained a zero – which, as in some other calculators of similar vintage, was displayed half-height relative to the other numerals. The calculator is in sporadically working order. The switch setting the number of decimal places to be displayed is sometimes respected, sometimes not. And it may take a few attempts to goad a correct result from its elderly electronics.