TAIWAN AND THE ELECTRONIC CALCULATOR REVOLUTION PART 1
THE UNITRON DC-12 LAUNCHES AN INDUSTRY
The history of the development of the electronic calculator can be found spread widely through many sources - the internet, books, technical papers and oral histories. Very largely, the quite thoroughly documented early part of it - that is to say, the 1960's and 1970's - centers heavily on the interactions between Japanese and US interests, be they inventors, entrepreneurs or corporations.
Largely overlooked in this time period is the entry of Taiwan (otherwise, the Republic of China) into the field beginning early in the 1970's. By the end of the decade, Taiwan was not just a participant in the industry but a powerhouse, manufacturing and exporting tens of millions of calculators per year. The story of how this came to be and some of the individual efforts and products are the focus of this series.
Background
Although Taiwanese manufacturers did not enter the field of electronic calculators until the "single chip calculator" was possible, the roots of their effort date back roughly a decade. Taiwan, as was the case with a number of nations at the time, decided to make a concerted effort to move from a national policy wherein local manufacturers were simply providing products that stood in against those imported from other countries and instead actively encouraged companies in Taiwan to think about large scale manufacture of products for export. At the same time the mid-1960's saw a sharp rise in well-educated entrepreneurs in Taiwan eager to develop products "at home." These developments, coupled with the success of Taiwanese businesses in fields that led to calculators in a linear fashion (televisions, radios and eventually IC fabrication) set the stage for the manufacture of electronic calculators.
Of course, the field of electronic calculators had behind it a variety of actors - in some cases, foreign corporations simply set up shop in Taiwan to manufacture IC's or whole calculators. Some companies ended up operating simply to manufacture calculators for foreign contractors, maintaining their own local identities but not putting that identity on the finished product. Still others operated in their own name or rebadged machines but had considerable foreign investment. Finally, there were those few that decided to venture into the field on their own using whatever components could be acquired on the market but manufacturing and selling calculators under their own names. Unitron, our subject here, was the first of the latter.
Unitron was formed in 1969 with the financial backing of the Lin Rong-Chung family, whose major business until then was textiles. Principals in the launch of the company were Professor Shi Min, and with him Qiu Xaixing, who had several years' worth of experience just before this working for an electronics company. Unitron entered the field of chip manufacturing and packaging and was not only the first such manufacturer in Taiwan but very importantly was also the first such company in Taiwan to launch a Research and Design department.
It was to that R&D department that now-legendary entrepreneur (and later founder of Acer) Stan Shih was added right after completing his education. It was Stan Shih who was primarily responsible for the calculator that became the Unitron DC-12.
In 1971 when Texas Instruments announced that it would be selling, on the open market, a chip that could be used in a "single chip calculator," Qiu Xaixing arranged for Unitron to acquire these chips for use in a calculator. (TI announced the availability of this chip, the TMS 1802, in September 1971).
Texas Instruments experienced significant delays in supplying these chips as a result of the enormous demand, and this led to Unitron having to buy Mostek chips as a substitute.
Stan Shih has been quoted as saying that he was not the only person at Unitron attempting to develop a calculator, and this seems to hint at the idea that Unitron was pushing to get a calculator built by allowing internal competition. Whatever the case, Shih not only designed the important circuits for the calculator but also prepared the calculator for his superiors as a finished product as much as could be done. For example, Shih had an industrial engineer design an attractive casing for the calculator and then himself found a Taiwanese company that could manufacture the molded casing. Shih also performed a cost analysis that laid out the dollars and cents of building his new calculator. No one else in Unitron went to this effort, and Shih's calculator was selected for production.
Shih's superiors immediately began tooling up to build the calculator, and acquired the money necessary to mass produce it. Actual dates are difficult to come by, but it seems as if the prototype was completed in April 1972. In October 1972, the calculator was released to the market as the Unitron DC-12.
The Unitron DC-12 was a basic, four function desk calculator powered by either 115 or 220 VAC. The chip used in the DC-12 was the Mostek MK 5012 P. Display tubes of the VFD type were supplied by Iseden of Japan, and the keyboard was obtained from Japan as well. The circuit boards inside the DC-12 as well as the entire body casing were manufactured in Taiwan. We will take a look inside the DC-12 in a later article and describe its construction.
Sales of the Unitron DC-12
It seems fairly certain, from extensive research, that the DC-12 was never sold in the United States. It was sold however in Guam in late 1972 as seen below.
(Above, advertisement for the Unitron DC-12 published in the Pacific Daily News, Agana Heights, Guam on December 15 1972. Illustration courtesy Newspapers.com.)
I have five Unitron DC-12 calculators in my collection; one of them was obtained from Greece, and its origin is unknown. It may well have been sold there. Four of them were obtained together from Spain and were found in the remaining items of an electronics and calculator repair shop which had been closed for 25 years. We will examine all of these in detail in a later article, but it suffices to say that the DC-12 was on the market in Europe and certainly was in Spain.
We cannot yet know how exactly many were made or for how long, but it wasn't many and wasn't long. These five are the only ones known to me as this is written in November 2023, and their serial numbers range from 05362 to 06832. The four from Spain came with boxes, and clearly the repair service was mix and matching boxes as machines were sent out; the highest serial on any box is 06958. This box actually says "73 06958" and the "73" is almost certainly a date code. Chip dates are late 1972. It is impossible that other examples do not exist, and some of them certainly are in Taiwan where the language barrier is a considerable blockade on discovering any in collections there. It is conceivable that the first five thousand or so were sold in Taiwan. It is remotely possible that production did not start at 00000.
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| Detail photos, Unitron DC-12. |
What we do know is that after one of Unitron's major chip customers, the giant ITT corporation, had tried to recruit talent from Unitron it was suggested that ITT buy Unitron, which it did in 1974. Before that, the family that financially backed Unitron decided to spend the money to start a completely separate new company to only manufacture calculators and asked Stan Shih to move to it. He did, before the end of 1972, but that's also yet another story for another article in this series.
The Unitron DC-12 hit the field in October 1972, according to Stan Shih, with fanfare as being the first Taiwanese calculator. And indeed, although there was at least one calculator manufactured in Taiwan that was for sale before the DC-12, that other calculator was manufactured with overseas funds and was made for sale in the US. The DC-12 had behind it Taiwanese money, Taiwanese ownership and was developed by an engineer educated wholly in Taiwan. Considering the fact that by the end of the decade Taiwan would be manufacturing over seven million calculators a year, and by the mid 1980's over 40 million a year, it seems historically important to recognize the Unitron / Stan Shih effort for the milestone that it is.
Notes.
Names - Names used above are the Westernized forms in the case of Unitron and Stan Shih. In the case of Unitron, the direct translation of the characters on the serial number plates of the calculators comes out as "Universal Electronic Industry Co., Ltd." When translated online from traditional Chinese into phonetic English, in articles written by industry insiders we find "Huanyu Electronics." Stan Shih goes by that name in almost all his published sources, but in the Chinese we find his real name, Shi Zhenrong. These challenges - and others - have led to the fact that while the story of Unitron can now be told in English fairly well, we absolutely are missing much of the nuance.
Sources - Many fragmentary accounts, Chinese websites, and ebooks have been consulted to attempt to string together the story above (and more of it is to come in future installments.) Sources for this story and the others to come will be published on this blog when the series is complete.
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| Unitron Industries plant, Hsinchu City, Taiwan circa 1972. Courtesy National Chiao Tung University. |
