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Interesting, but FYI by the 80's calculators were already at near-commodity pricing. The Casio Mini came out in 1972, and was priced at under $100. (One source has it at Y12,800 which at that time was the equivalent of about $45.)

Oh, sorry, never mind, rereading your sentence I see it was just a simple typo and you meant "early 1970s" for the first reference.

This is wonderful. Talk about crashing through the $100 floor. Was nice when desktops smashed through the $1000 floor.

And there's still much waste in PC design. Look at the size of an average notebook versus a typical desktop, There's huge overprovisioning everywhere in the desktop. Computers have been in our faces for so long that we're not only accustomed to them taking substantial space, we practically demand it. Admit it, contemptuous thoughts about slowness, limitations, and compromises flit through our minds whenever we contemplate a PC that doesn't occupy a sizable tower. Someday towers will look as clunky as those 1970s Heathkit calculators that were almost the size of a shoe box and for input had basically the numeric keypad used on keyboards for desktop computers.

Even the typical netbook could be smaller. For instance, if the power consumption could be lowered even further, perhaps by running recent CPUs under 1GHz, then the power supply could be smaller, and maybe cooling fans could be omitted, saving even more space and power, and eliminating the biggest source of noise, and an expensive component. There is still much PC functionality split among many separate chips. I'm guessing these are some of what they're doing to ultimately get down to $10.

Many thousands of them chained together would make one of these.

From This entry:

Division is a bit more complicated, but still automatic. One oddity is the appearance of two divide keys on the keyboard. Apparently this was a result of another calculator company having a patent on a 'single key' divide function, which Friden's lawyers were concerned enough about to insist that the machine not have a single key for division. In fact, the 'left' division key is what actually triggers the division to take place, but, if actuated by itself, the resultant quotient will be the 10's compliment of the expected result. The 'right' divide key switches the mode of the counter register (where the quotient is accumulated) so that it increments instead of decrements during the repeated subtraction process that makes up division. So, in order to get the expected answer, both divide keys must be pressed at once.

Hewlett Packard Model 9100B Electronic Calculator - well, an upgraded version of it that had a card reader and printer built-in. I bought it at a flea market back in the 80's for $3. It didn't come with a power cord, but I found one that fit and the thing actually worked (though I didn't have a manual). I would take it apart and put it back together frequently - the boards and keyboard were really cool and quite modular, and the thing weighed at least 30 pounds. The case was eighth-inch steel.

wow, here's some great stuff on the 9830. I didn't know it had 15K of memory, or that it could support a 1.5M hard drive. I remember the audio tape storage, though, and recording a program in the middle of a tape of Handel's Messiah and putting it in the stereo to play. This page calls it the first Personal Computer ever, but says it was actually released in late 1972, not 1971, as I remember. (Of course, I was like two at the time...) It also has a good picture of a segment of the display, which was a 7x5 not a 9x5. When it ran for a while it always filled the room with that old HP smell, of hot circuit boards but specifically HP boards. Other companies smelled different.

I don't think that's a problem. Hewlett-Packard's HP-85 desktop, http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/hp85.html, popular in the 1980s, had a 32 character by 16 line display, 256 x 192 dots. They were quite adequate.

At the expense of shops who were using no computer at all. Or abacuses.

I would laugh if the situation weren't so serious for my company. We are on the verge of a disaster.

Chisembop manual sales have been flat for 5 years.

Adding machine sales are down 38%.

Calculator sales are down 52%, including the newest hand held models.

Slide rule sales are down 79%.

Analytical engine sales are down 93%.

Tabulator sales are down 98%.

Our abacus miniaturization project is running into problems with prior art by a "major" competitor.

To top it off, our hope for a Multitronic breakthrough appears to have dangerous side effects after four models that were outright failures.

Unless we can pump up our mentat outsourcing service, or complete development of our Make me a Rainman! kit, we're doomed! Doomed I tell you! :(

"I would definitely reconfigure my server to redirect anyone with a referer from Slashdot to a very tiny ascii picture of my wang."

You mean, like this?