Info and Resources

Home

Compare

Shop

Research

Sell

Casio

Casio, Inc. (Japanese:カシオ計算機株式会社 ''Kashio Keisanki Kabushikigaisha'') is an electronic devices manufacturing company with its headquarters in the Japanese capital, Tokyo. The company was founded in April 1946 by Tadao Kashio (樫尾和雄 ''Kashio Tadao''), an engineer specializing in fabrication technology. Kashio's first major product was the ''yubiwa pipe'', a finger ring that would hold a cigarette, allowing the wearer to smoke the cigarette down to its nub while also leaving the wearer's hands free. Japan was impoverished immediately following World War II and cigarettes were valuable, so the invention was very successful. After seeing the electric calculators at the first Business Show in Ginza, Tokyo in 1949, Kashio and his younger brothers used their profits from the yubiwa pipe to develop their own calculators. Most of the calculators at that time worked using gears and could be operated by hand using a crank or using a motor. Kashio had some knowledge of electronics, and set out to make a calculator using solenoids. The desk-sized calculator was finished in 1954, sold for 485,000 yen and was Japan's first electronic calculator. One of the central innovations of the calculator was its adoption of the 10-key number pad; at that time other calculators were using a "full keypad", which meant that each place in the number (1s, 10s, 100s, etc...) had nine keys. Another innovation was the use of a single display window instead of the three display windows (one for each argument and one for the answer) used in other calculators. In 1957 Casio released the Model 14-A, the world's first all-electric compact calculator. 1957 also marked the establishment of Casio Computer Co. Ltd.

Timeline of important product releases

1957 Casio releases the Model 14-A, the world's first all electric compact calculator

1965 The 001 calculator is released

1972

More...

Casio

The company spells its name with the first letter only capitalized on their web site at http://www.casio.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=corporate.home They also spell it in full caps, but since initial cap is conventional, I changed it to that style. I don't know why Japanese companies use full caps, but I speculate that it's because, the Japanese language not having capital letters, Japanese people don't know how to capitalize. :Japanese usually use all caps in the Roman alphabet. Rarely do I see them using lowercase letters at all (but there are exceptions). For example, if you were playing a Japanese video game and it asks for your name, often you'll have a choice between hiragana, katakana, or uppercase Roman letters -- but no lowercase. I don't think it's a matter of them not knowing how to capitalize; it's more that they don't care because they don't use Roman letters much. Also, for logos, there's the matter of style: an all-caps logo might stand out more. - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:52, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

More...

Casio FX-850P

The Casio FX-850P is a scientific calculator.

Technical specifications

2 lines with 32 5x7 characters LCD

* (some indicators and a 5 digit 7-segment display)

8 kb RAM

Integrated speaker

Internal slot for memory expansion (32kb?)

connector with support for rs232 and centronics

(only level converter for rs232 needed)

(only latch for centronics needed)

2 3V CR2032 lithium as power supply

1 3V CR2012 lithium as RAM power supply Category:Programmable calculators

More...

Casio CZ Synthesizers

Casio made programmable synthesizers very affordable in the mid-1980s with their CZ series of Phase distortion synthesizers. There were five models of CZ synthesizers released: the CZ-101, CZ-1000, CZ-3000, CZ-5000, and finally the CZ-1. The CZ was a remarkably flexible synthesizer, and was cheap enough to make programmable synthesizers affordable enough to be purchased by garage bands. Yamaha soon introduced their own low-cost digital synthesizers, including the DX-21 and DX-100, in light of the success of the CZ series. thumb|400px|The Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer|The Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer offered full sized keys.

Programming the CZ synthesizers

In order to make these synthesizers inexpensive, they did not use traditional analog filters, but were entirely digital. Like many early digital synthesizers, its sound was regarded as "thinner" than the sound of an analog synthesizer. The CZ line used phase distortion to somewhat simulate an analog filter. It had in total eight different waveforms: as well as the standard sawtooth, square, and pulse waveforms, it had a special double sine waveform, a half-sine waveform, and three waveforms with simulated filter resonance: resonant sawtooth, triangle, and trapezoidal waveforms. The simulated filter resonance was not considered to sound much like real filter resonance, being a simple sine wave at the filter "cutoff" instead of a real filter resonating. Each digital oscillator could have one or two waveforms. Unlike other synthesizers, where having multiple waveforms added the multiple waveforms together, the CZ synthesizers would play one waveform and then play the other waveform in series; this resulted in there being a fundamental added one octave below the pitch of the sound. It was possible to combine two non-resonant waveforms together, combine a resonant waveform with a non-resonant waveform, but it was not possible to combine two resonant waveforms. The CZ-101 and CZ-1000 had only eight

More...

Casio