I test drove one of these as a youngster when my father brought a demo home from the salesman. Nobody had seen anything like it, and I did want to keep it beca

I test drove one of these as a youngster when my father brought a demo home from the salesman. Nobody had seen anything like it, and I did want to keep it because the registers looked so promising, but otherwise it really didn't do that much. For most things it could be outperformed by an unpowered slide rule or Magic Brain Calculator. Or a printing adding machine when you need the output document. Plus it was about the same price as a new Volkswagen beetle which was about the cheapest car and about the only import you would usually see. People were still not very comfortable driving a foreign car across the US because there were virtually no available tires, parts, qualified mechanics, or metric tools in many states at all, and seldom until you got to a big city, most often close to a port of arrival at a factory dealer. A new Ford Falcon could be had for only a few hundred dollars more. I really wanted to work with the Friden extensively but we could not keep it, though I was really looking forward to seeing what they came up with next even more. Well, within a couple years at school we were very fortunate to get a Wang 370 which you could program with the same kind of blank computer cards as the IBM 360 at the university. But only one card at a time almost like it was a toaster. The future was going to be great, we were going to the moon!