Continental Class 800

Adding booking machine

ca. 1951

The Wanderer-Werke company in Sigmar-Schönau near Leipzig began building full-keyboard adding machines in 1916 and marketed them under the Continental brand name. At the end of the 1920s, the very voluminous and heavy machines of the first series (cf. inv. no. FDM 9136) were scaled down, and the second series, including the table model 8 (cf. inv. no. FDM 9127), was created. This was the basic model for a wide range of booking machines, which could be equipped with the most diverse add-ons depending on requirements. These add-ons were often used to automate certain recurring functions during booking. The 800 model was available as early as 1935 and had a balancing arithmetic unit and could be equipped with 4, 6 or 8 adding memory units; the memory units were operated by toothed racks. The entire storage mechanism sat below the base plate of the basic model and was covered by a sheet metal tray. The machine therefore had to be suspended in a frame to relieve the load. The special model available here is a health insurance machine and is equipped for their accounting of contributions. It has 8 memory units that can be accessed from the keypad. The successor model is the 900 class, which can be equipped with more memory units, all of which can also be balanced. Machines with the name Continental continued to be built in Schönau after World War II, but the rights to the name were transferred to the West German company Wanderer AG (Munich and Cologne) around 1955. Production of the 900 and 9000 models (with integrated typewriter) was transferred to VEB Optima Büromaschinenwerk Erfurth and marketed under the new name Optimatic. Production of the 800 class was discontinued.