Electronic Calculator

The electronic calculator that succeeded the sophisticated but noisy pinwheel calculator was a very welcome addition to the dealing room.

The one we acquired in 1968 was a Sharp Compet 32. It sold for just under $1,000, £416 with the dollar then at 2.4 to the pound. To put that in context, average UK house prices at the time were £4,000.

As can be seen it was not small or light, weighing in at 6.5 kilos, half the weight of a Good Delivery bar.

Our new calculator had the luxury of displaying the decimal point. However, up until the collapse of the Gold Pool in 1968, gold was fixed in shillings and pence and continued to be converted back to sterling thereafter. Even our new calculator couldn’t work that out, so it was back to the pencil and paper until decimalisation in 1971. It would be another decade before we had spreadsheets to conduct multiple calculations, first on the Apple 2 with VisiCalc in 1979, followed by Lotus 123 on the IBM 1 in 1983, while “asking Siri” for the answer wasn’t even on the horizon of science fiction.

With thanks to Alan Baker, ex Rothschilds, Sharps Pixley, Deutsche Bank and former Chairman of the LBMA