Monroe Epic


The Monroe EPIC was a programmable calculator that came on the market in the 1960s. It consisted of a large desktop unit which attached to a floor-standing logic tower and was capable of being programmed to perform many computer-like functions. However, the only form of a branching instruction available was a hard-coded unconditional branch that always executed at program completion to return to the starting instruction of the program. This made the creation of conditional branching logic, such as IF-THEN-ELSE, impossible.