Emil Dudek, a South Wales, U.K., technology enthusiast has for eight years been acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, deconstructing them, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting them to his website with specs and comments. In all, his site features five hundred eighty-three calculators and 128 brands.

“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window…The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations”

Says Dudek.

Each of the 583 calculators on the site feature power, case, size, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. Dudek’s ultimate goal is to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators all of which were manufactured in the 1970′s.

Interestingly, for a whole generation, calculators were an introduction to the world of digital computing. Back in the day, the desktop and later pocket-sized machines freed users from log tables and charts.

“I am a collector in transit,” says Dudek, “The important thing is the information. The whole purpose of my site is to take obscure things from the past and put information about it on the web so other people who may be searching for that information can find it.”

Here are some comments on the site about the American M-26 calculator from 1975 or 1976, unknown manufacturer:

“The logic is pretty poor with no recovery, disappearing negative sign, negative zero and divide to negative zero bugs, basic percentage function and quirky constant function. My example does not have reset on power-up either. A must for anyone’s collection — just to see how bad a calculator can be…”

Dudek says:

“I have comments for every calculator on my site and those are the important part…I have to explain how the the device works…I didn’t realize how few companies made the guts of the calculator…It’s very interesting to see the chips that ran these devices and where they came from.”