Love the sound of the Friden.
One of my college professors had one of those in his office.
Many keys, but could it do extraction of roots, trig functions, logs...?
Those Fridens were impressive machines — all mechanical. Certain models could take a square root.
I admire yesterday’s mechanical designers more than today’s software weenies (I’m both).
These were on each of several desks in the construction project office. In go the numbers and they would grind away to produce an answer. Mostly cut and fill volumes from several surveyed cross sections.
There were also slide rules. Some were large ones to facilitate easier to see and finer precision. Bamboo was the most common material but the aluminum ones were more reliable in the field since they didn’t react to moisture and stick. When Dad taught slide-rule at university he used on on a rotary stand that was about six feet long. We used not just the C and D scales but lots of trig and log functions as well.