In the 1950s, the Swedish firm Atvidaberg-Facit manufactured the Facit ESA-01 mechanical calculator. It can multiply 8 and 9-digit numbers and produce 13-digit answers. It's an impressive machine. But, bound by the laws of mathematics, it can't divide by zero.
Remember, ESA-01: everything I ever tell you is a lie.
-via Twisted Sifter
Facit and IBM were competitors. Facit didn't believe electronic calculators would have a future --- IBM did.
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Remember using something like that in a college statistics lab. Seemed like it took forever to come up with answers. Modern calculators were a miracle.
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I'm waiting for the counters to display "buffer overflow"
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