My dad's calculators

Being an accountant, dad was interested in labour-saving calculators. Here is the first appearance of an electro-mechanical calculator in the mid-60s. The photo was taken by him in his Ampang Road office:

Unfortunately the photo was taken for the sake of the people, who I think were shareholders of the taxi company he was the secretary of, so you don't see much of the calculator. But here's another shot taken by me perhaps in 1972:

By this time he was working in his home office. (The chess player is my schoolmate. He had constructed the chessboard himself. It was actually an overturned wooden box which held the chess pieces for transport. Also notice the use of algebraic notation.) But back to the calculator. Based on the fact that it could do long division, I have determined that it's the Olivetti Divisumma 24GT described in detail here. It was already over a decade old when my dad bought one, but it took that many years to be affordable for Malaysians. By the time of the second photo, it was seldom used as he had an electronic calculator. I don't remember the Olivetti in his effects when he died in 1978 so he may have disposed of it already (university students could afford scientific calculators by 1976). There was a portable electronic printing calculator in his effects.

My dad had an older hand operated pinwheel mechanical calculator that was lying around, out of use, by the time I was old enough to poke around his office. From what I remember, it's probably this Odhner model:

You could do division by repeated subtraction.

He also had a pocket addiator which I have mentioned in this post. I never saw him use it much and it became my plaything at some point.

I seem to remember he did give me some lessons on using an abacus when I was required to learn it in Chinese primary school.  It makes sense that he would know this too.

Outside my dad's office

I still remember the address of my dad's office: 75 Ampang Road. Here's a photo I took in the late 60s of the street outside it. Sorry about the blemishes but it's a miracle the negative is even legible.

P: Billboard advertising Philips: Look forward to the future. As if you could look backwards to the future, hahaha. As mentioned before Philips was a major brand of radios and home entertainment equipment in Malaysia.

N: A car with N plates from Negeri Sembilan (literally 9 states), a small state to the south of Selangor, where KL is situated. Why is it seemingly blocking a lane? It isn't broken down and nobody is waiting in it. It's actually double parked. Perhaps the owner was nearby, ready to move it if asked to. This reminded me how lax road regulation enforcement was in those days of relatively sparse traffic.

B: Selangor plates started with B. I think Perak started with A, being the first to have cars, and after B they went to mnemonic letters.

R: A restaurant, actually a "coffee shop", serving Hainanese Chicken Rice.

C: This appears to be an advertisement for 555 State Express, a brand of cigarette. Which reminds me I once found a non-functional lighter amongst my dad's stuff. When I asked how he came about it, he said he had once been a smoker. Apparently he had been a hard man until he got religion, before I was born.

7: Advertisement for 7-Up and another soft drink.

D: Next door to my dad's office was a dispensary, what we now call a GP's surgery. The term referred to the fact that the doctor prescribed medications and his assistants compounded them in-house. I believe they mixed some garish colouring into the milky liquid medications so that patients wouldn't think they were beverages. So a dispensary was a one-stop shop. This one was headed by a relative of my mother, but we didn't go there often, perhaps there was another more convenient to our home. In any case they were all pretty much of equal competence, products of the British medical school system.

For comparison, here is a Google Street View of the rough location. So much has changed that I cannot identify the exact spot my photo was taken, but I think it's close to where the vegetation in front of tall buildings in the middle of the view is.