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Er, that phrase comes from mechanical hand-cranked calculators.

The 8008 was an 18-pin chip. I bought one for $125 when it first came out, and it was a royal pain to use, since the address, data, and startup mode were all folded onto the same pins. But when you added eight 1K DRAMs and all the glue logic, the computer was quite sophisticated. I don't remember the clock speed, but I'm sure it was less than 1 MHz.

The real chips that were used in many projects were the later 8080 and Motorola 6800 (and the 6502 copy of it in the days before hefty lawsuits).

An Wang is worth historical mention. He
invented the basis of core memory, the predecessor of RAM, in 1949. Core memory was as critical to computers of the late 1950's and 1960's as RAM is now. Prior to Core, memory solutions included drum (like today's magnetic disk), vacuum tubes, the Williams Tube, and Delay Lines - all of which were problematic.

Here's another link to his biography. (Note that it took several years of lawsuits before he got any money.)

With the royalties from Core he founded Wang Labs, which until about 1990 was a player in the calculating and computing markets. In 1965 Wang Labs built one of the first electronic desk calculators, and built several successful pre-computer desktops, like word processors and such. But Wang Labs never successfully transitioned into the general purpose PC market (AFAIK.)

Core was expensive. According to This, 131K cost $823,500 in 1968 - about $.75/bit. Cost of memory dropped below $.01 per bit in the late 1960's or early 1970's. Now, 256MB=$60 =~ $.0000022 per bit. Today, that 256MB would cost $1647905221.37 - a bit steep for a desktop.

Info on how Core works as well as some interesting historical information is here.

Made AFAIK the FIRST desktop electronic calculator--the LOCI, which calculated logarithms in hardware circa 1965 using magnetic cores as part of the calculation hardware. This, in a time when a rotary calculator with a square root button was a very big deal. I played briefly with a LOCI at a trade show and, yes, if you keyed in 2 X 2, it displayed the result as 3.99999999999.

They went on to produce a very successful line of desktop electronic calculators. Famous story is that they were trying to sell them into financial institutions, and a customer tried replicating some calculations from his book of mortgage tables. They didn't agree, and it turned out the Wang calculator was right and the book was wrong and Wang's reputation in the financial industry was made.

Wang abandoned calculators circa 1971, feeling that the had been commoditized. In retrospect, you could have an interesting debate on whether or not he was right. Seeing HP introduce a new one in 2003 has to make me think there was QUITE a bit of juice left in that market.

It was my reward for getting into grammar school, and my biggest regret is that I haven't got it anymore.

Surely someone is old enough to have had an earlier calculator?

right here Bought it in 1972 and it does everything I need, everything since then has just been 'more and more' of the same thing. Pfft.

This is all documented in the book "the Chip" by T. R. Reid, which I literally have on my desk as I write this. It is briefly summarized here:

In those days, electrical engineers were aware on the potential of digital electronics, however, they faced a big limitation known as the "Tyranny of Numbers." This was the metaphor that described the exponentially increasing number of components required to design improved circuits, against the physical limitations derived from the number of components that could be assembled together. Both, Kilby at Texas Instruments, and Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, were working on a solution to this problem during 1958 and 1959.

[First Integrated Circuit] The solution was found in the monolithic (meaning formed from a single crystal) integrated circuit. Instead of designing smaller components, they found the way to fabricate entire networks of discrete components in a single sequence by laying them into a single crystal (chip) of semiconductor material. Kilby used germanium and Noyce used silicon.

The problem was that transistors still had to be interconnected to form electronic circuits, and hand-soldering thousands of components to thousands of bits of wire was expensive and time-consuming. It was also unreliable; every soldered joint was a potential source of trouble. The challenge was to find cost-effective, reliable ways of producing these components and interconnecting them.

The Tyranny of Numbers was quite real, and occupied minds for most of the 50s. The solution of this basic and fundamental problem made possible the computer age. They are probably as important as the binary logic that runs on them.

You can also read more about this on the Texas Instrument Website.

Recently Slashdot presented an article about the only remaining 1st generation computer. It is located in Australia and was retired in 1964 from active duty. Yet five years after it was retired, we put people on our moon with engineering which was mostly worked out on Napier's Bones, an even older technology in comparison.

The better educated student is the one who understands the Mathematics of Napier's Bones, and not the one who knows how to fix the registry in Windows NT. Long journeys start with small footsteps. Let's modestly hope that our high school students are as well versed in the facts of Science as they stood on the day we first landed on the moon. If there is any danger that they will outgrow that, why then we can begin to worry.