Slashdot Mirror
The Handheld Calculator Turns 40
Ian Lamont writes "The handheld calculator turns 40 years old this year, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has officially added to its collection examples of the first two programmable calculators, the TI-58 and TI-59. The museum already has the original 1967 'Cal-Tech' prototype, which weighs three pounds. At a ceremony at the Smithsonian yesterday, Jerry Merryman, one of the members of the TI team which developed the calculator, said that the project was started without a set budget and was something that 'we did in our spare time.' Antique calculators have a devoted following; news of a contest celebrating the 35th anniversary of the HP-35 slide rule calculator brought hundreds of fans out of the woodwork to reminisce about the pros and cons of various 70s' era calculators. There are a lot of Web resources devoted to these devices, including the Old Calculators Web Museum, where you can see pictures of everything from the Bohn Contex Model 10 Mechanical Calculator ('apparently the design of the machine caught the attention of the Soviets') to TI's first scientific calculator, the SR-20 ('keyboards were prone to bounce even when new')."
in my hand.
40 years and I still can't find one with a backlight. I can't be the only one who codes in a dimly lit cave.
I was expected something gasoline driven.
In the early Seventies there was a calculator advertising jingle that was so stupid it has stayed with me for all these years: You can't go wrong with Rockwell, They're really such a treat. They've got BIG GREEN NUMBERS, And little rubber feet.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Was gonna say i thought my TI-55 was the first (it just wasn't useful as one) but the article ACTUALLY says: the Smithsonian expanded its collection to include two of the first programmable calculators, the TI-58 and TI-59.
:(
Two of the first != the first two
I bet someone did better on math SAT than verbal....
I still use both my TI-55 and TI-30. Had to hack the TI-55 to use a regular battery after the second nicad died. Recently bought one on ebay to try and restore mine but the battery pack wasn't rebuildable
In 1967 I was in the advanced development group of the GE radio receiver department. We set out to build a consumer electronic calculator. What we originally built wasn't very good having 6 digits and strange math but that wasn't what killed the progject. It was the marketing department saying nobody would ever want a home calculator because they already had adding machines. I later headed the project to create the first electronic clock radio. The LSI chip we designed had 826 transistors in it. That was a much more successful project and is the ancestor of the clock radios almost everyone has now. Even for that project the GE Telecron department (since diseased) said you could never make an electronic timer as cheaply and reliably as an electric clock.
Someone will likely know but if the calculator, specifically hand-held if you'd like, is 40 then what of the abacus? Some of those were small enough to hold in a hand. Do those count or does this, for some reason, require that they be powered? (Not to be pedantic but I'm really quite curious and didn't see that in the article anywhere.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I was shopping in a k-mart kind of store mny years ago. They had a hand held calculator on sale for $99.95. I exclaimed to my wife "Let's get one! They will never be any cheaper!" BTW, I'm the same guy that passed up a Shelby 427 SC Cobra for $5K because it would never be worth anything.
I didn't use sci calc for the last 30 years. Saw TI calculator in Costco last year, and was amazed by its dinosaurs look. Apparently like little has been changed from the early models, and the most surprising is that these antics cost more than hundred bucks!
Anyone recall the name of that school-marketed calculator that had Mr. Owl dressed up like an Oxford professor?
I suggest you read Slashdot
...and recently patented.
--
So who is hotte? Ali or Ali's sister?
The TI-55 was just a few month AFTER the TI-57, TI-58 and TI-59. (which were released at the same time)
So in this case two of the first is the same as the first two. If you ignore the earlier SR series programmable calculators as not being as significantly programmable as the 55, 57, 58 and 59.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it still a virgin and does it still live at home with its mother?
Reconize!
You could squeeze cheat sheets into those things, too, though the memory was a bit limited...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
A, nameless, US government institution, that I was passingly involved with, had an old calculator. Worked fine, added, subtracted, etc. Cost new somewhere in the $1000 range. Equipment that expensive needed an inventory tag, so someone put it on the battery case. Said battery was subsequently replaced.
Now, you have a calculator that could be replaced for $5, needing an annual, physical inventory because of the initial purchase cost. It would take about 3-4 man hours annually to find the old battery case so that bar code could be scanned.
Declaring the calculator surplus would be many hours of paperwork, besides the calculator was in daily use and functioning perfectly.
Any attempts at depreciating would result in headlines such as "Government looses $XXXM in computing equipment".
So the farce, as far as I know, continues today.
Programmable pocket calculators have become awfully clumsy to use. It would be nice if one could move to iphone type interfaces or include a (maybe stripped down) computer algebra system. They survive only because they have become cheep,rugged and robust and can be used in schools early on. I loved to play with these toys when I was younger. But thats what they have remained: toys.
Thinking back thirty-five odd years, I remember a friend with an impossibly cool HP, RPN of course, and a built in teeny card reader; I still recall the *click* of the keys. But what sold me on my first digital calculator in high school was realizing that you could type in numbers, turn it upside down, and spell out words. Sort of.
Three Squirrels
The first programmable hand-held calculator was Hewlett Packard's HP-65. The SR-52 came a year later. HP then brought out the HP-67, and TI followed a year later with the TI-59. HP then came out with the HP-41 handheld programmable with slots for adding interfaces including HP-IL allowing the calc to handle all kinds of control and data-collections chores in labs. TI followed suit with the TI-88 the following year. I mean the year after that. No, it was the next year. The year after? As a matter of fact, TI never did come out with competition for the HP-41.
But there is no doubt that the first programmable handheld was the HP-65. If they don't have that in their collection then they ain't got the first.
SS378008
hahahahaha.....ok, it was funny in the 70's.
-Styopa
55318008 is better.
I still have the Casio fx-115 scientific calculator I bought like 20 years ago in Innsbruck. Solar Cell powered and still works great, although a bit grungy.
My wife and I got married in 1974 and after looking at our wedding money spent $120+ for a TI SR-10 calculator by mail order from a discounter. I remember thinking that the price couldn't fall much more so it was definitely time to buy it. A wonderful device it was ... really cool and useful.
Faithful companion for 15 years, one day it finally died and I was unable to figure out why it wouldn't turn on. I have a TI-83 now, much more capable, but it just isn't the same. I still have the urge to punch 2 2 + ENTER to get a 4.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I think the abacus is hand-held. Maybe the word "electronic" was left out of the headline?
I save my pennies the year I graduated from high school and splurged on a TI-59, which not only served me well, but factored numbers too (one of my favourite programs I wrote for it). Cards, spaghetti code, the works. I actually defined a small virtual processor, wrote an emulator for it that ran on the TI-59, and hand-assembled programs for that virtual processor (which resembled a PIC in a number of ways, now that I think of it). Geek city, huh?
It was only much later that I confirmed that 52579 is prime, because I was never patient enough to let it finish trying factors. A prize for who can tell me what number I was factoring. :-)
I wish I still had that thing. Haven't seen it in years.
...laura
Curt Herzstark designed the Curta handheld calculator while he was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Upon release in 1945, he started a company to manufacture these mechanical handheld calculators.
... he designed it to be handheld. The main cylinder fits within the hand, and the input sliders were made to be set by fingers. In a foreshadowing of computer architecture, he used complimentary arithmetic to do both subtraction and addition.
Herzstark recognized the importance of user interface
Although crank-driven, a Curta is surprisingly fast at the basic four functions. This is because you can rotate the output register to do automatic multiplies by powers of ten.
Made in Lichtenstein, the Curtas were superbly machined, with a feel comparable to a high quality Nikon F camera.
His peppermill calculators were sold from 1947 until 1972; today, they're mostly collectors items. But I use one to run my Klein Bottle business.
Why has nobody yet mentioned the slide rule? My father went through his first year of graduate school with one of those bad boys.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I really wish my wife hadn't locked my TI-58 into the print cradle with the power on. One of the program chips had a really nice power curve for predicting completion time for running speed by distance.
I have two SR-10s (square, inverse AND square root -- woo hoo!). My original purchase has the box, charger, case and manual. The problem is that LED junctions burn out. Got a second one at a garage sale but it had a different junction burnt out.
Similar ones are (or I hope by now they were) mandatory for the natural science students in Dutch high-schools, you have to use them on the final exam even! I think since the late 90s. You should be able to program a function in it and look at the graph it draws on the screen. This more or less diminishes math knowledge to knowing how to use the device (which I bet is a bitch), and not so much understand how to find the derivatives, zero points, etc of a function. But what bothers me the most is that these machines cost quite a lot and are completely useless! Even the students going on in natural sciences won't use them because Mathematica and the likes are much more practical for mathematical work than a limited calculator.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
My engineering professors must be so proud.
My first programmable was the TI-55.....I've still got it somewhere. I remember when I went to take my first class FCC license, they made you take the battery out and turn it on, just to make sure you were not "cheating" with some preprogrammed code.
As none of the links in the article actually seem to link to a description/picture of the device, here is one for your enjoyment:
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/texas_insturments_ti_58.html
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I'd put together a program to generate determinants of 3x3 matrices, and one of the questions was: "Calculate the determinant of this matrix."
That would be the DET function on an HP-28 or HP-48. I wrote a program for my HP-28 in college that showed a four-dimensional hypercube rotating on the little LCD screen in real time. The matrix functions came in quite handy for rotational transforms.
One of the things that surprised me was that the HP-28 was actually faster than the company's VAX for doing magnetic field calculations for a Hemholtz coil I had to design within a 5% field tolerance within a cylindrical volume in the center (this was in 1990). I used it to build a lookup table for getting definite integrals of some goofy function that came out of the Biot-Savart law. I tested the routines on my calculator before running them on the VAX before I realized the calculator was beating the pants off the VAX. They had that VAX in its own room with air conditioning and everything. I wonder what that was all about. Last I heard they were buying lots of HP calculators.
don't you mean 55378008 ?
> ... officially added to its collection examples of the first two
> programmable calculators, the TI-58 and TI-59.
Hm. The HP-65 came out in '74, the TI-58 and TI-57 in '77.
I had a TI-57 but I also had a programmable calculator one before that, a NatSemi Scientific-PR, which was a '75 machine, AFAIK.
The TI-58 and 59 are *not* the first programmable calculators by a long shot.
Yes, but can these old calculators work out the modern answer (recently redefined by the calculation software industry leader as 100,000)?
BOMAR BRAIN
... a geek's geek.
Out of Massachusetts, it was the first affordable calculator. About once a month there might be one on Ebay.
It was also the name for an uber-geek
80085 turns 40 tomorrow.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
I was at T.I. as a calculator design Engineer from 1972 until late 1975 before moving over to the corporate research lab to work on magnetic bubble memories. I worked on several different scientific and business models and was the project engineer for the rare TI-150, the only handheld model to use a plasma (neon) display. I still have one of the prototypes here at my desk in good working condition. I did parts of the electrical design of the magnetic card readers for the SR-52 and SR-60 as well as parts of the main board design for the latter. All that and lots of work on other models, too. Fun projects, good people to work with and fond memories. If any of my old co-workers from that time are reading this, you can get in touch via the web site my nickname links to.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Holy cow, my dad had (has?) one of those mechanical Bohn calculators. It required quite a bit of muscle to press the lever. It made a loud "shlunk-chunk" that one could hear all over the house. It was not very user friendly, at least until you got used to it.
Since he's kind of a pack-rat, we used to joke that his home-office could be a museum. Our joke was half-right it seems.
Table-ized A.I.
TI makes calculators that are pretty darn nice for school use. The TI-89 titanium (I WANT!!) can do so much amazing stuff (factoring, for example) that they've banned it on the SAT, ACT and other exams. The TI-83/4+ is currently what most of my high school uses. It's amazing some of the things you can do with these calculators... someone mentioned writing a program to do matrices. Well, matrices are built right in, and can be multiplied, etc. without any extra programming effort. Of course, for those who want to, (like me) you can write plenty of useful programs. The built in TI-BASIC is somewhat limited, though I have made some handy programs with it (no more quadratic formula by hand... let the calc do it and show the work, too!). The 83+ and 84+ can also be programmed with ASM, which must be done on a computer (tetris, anyone? Relieves boredom in math class!). They now even have mini-USB ports on the calcs (89 titanium and 84+) so that they can communicate with each other, such as sending programs or apps between calcs, or even (if you school has a lot of money, which mine doesn't) then have a calculator network. Cool stuff. I love my calculator.
Although the HP 9100 of 1968 was a desktop calculator and not a hand-held, it was programmable with IF statements (somewhat like BASIC), and model B about a year later implemented subroutines. One could call it the "first microcomputer".
http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm
Table-ized A.I.
Well, they were LEDs and filled with lead if you ever opened one up!
/. time, which is reverse from normal. Hell, I waited a year and change. A slow adopter...
But, we forgive you for being nearly a three-quarters of a million in
Texas Intruments are amazing when it comes to handheld calculators. I got one in January and use it all the time for much more then working out sums for maths.
Does anyone know of a decent currently made RPN calculator? Two years ago when my old 48sx wore out, I started looking for one. Everything HP made looked like a cruddy TI. In a panic I found a 48g in good shape on craigslist. Eventually it will wear out. I cannot tolerate an algebraic calculator or a calculator without a nice big stack.
-- QED
Hey, I've got a working TI-58 and some of the original programming sheets. Great machine, though the battery doesn't work anymore and the leds are flickering, but well, I can still enter my tic-tac-toe program and be beaten by a calculator (time per move: several minutes).
Ah, they don't make them like that anymore.
There are excellent programs available for the Palm Pilot that duplicate the functionality of HP calculators. One benefit is that you can get a decent Palm, plus the software (which typically sells for around $25) for less than a new scientific calculator today. I have yet to see any that duplicate all the functionality of my HP 28S, but they have more memory and better screens. And yes, RPN.
All TI demonstrated in 1967 was a prototype that weighed 3 pounds. TI's own website places the introduction of their first "consumer electronics product", the TI-2500 Datamath, at 1972.
this page lists portable calculators appearing in 1970, and pocket calculators in 1971. No TI firsts there.
Anyone with a TI-89 should check out http://paxm.org/symbulator/download/rpn.html.
It provides RPN for the TI-89 and also has an option for 86 style bar menus.
It's by far the single most useful program I have on my 89.
The first handheld programmable calculator was the HP 65 (1972) : 100 program steps, magnetic card reader, $800
:-)
:-(
The first TI handheld programmable calculator was the TI SR 52 : 224 program steps, magnetic card reader, $395
TI 57, 58 and 59 appeared in 1977. 58C (constant memory) in 1979.
My 1979 58C is still going strong
My HP 65 works OK but the card reader does not work anymore ("gummy" wheel inside the reader)
My Casio fx-3600P is still in active service, which I must have got over 25 years ago. Awesome machine - light and slim, comes in a little wallet-type thing (from which the calculator may easily be removed). 10-digit display plus exponent. Full compliment of sin, cosh, factorial and all the rest of it, plus stats, integrals, fractions, and programmable (in a primitive but still useful way). Ahh, they don't make em like they used to...
Bonus: despite heavy use over the years, I've never had to change the battery.
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
I've had my granddad's old HP-35 (complete with battery pack, leather case, charger, and manual) lying about for ages. I always thought the LEDs were kinda cool. Then this article made me go look it up on Ebay for kicks...
Holy crap!
Some people are shelling out $250 for these things! Granted, it kind of pales next to the original price of $395 in 1972 dollars, but still. It's an old pocket calculator. Collectors are a nutty bunch, I tell you...
We used to play cards after supper with a Japanese student about 30 or so years ago. At the end of a round she used to add up all the points on a 'virtual abacus' in her imagination, holding her fingers in the air in front her. She was astonishingly quick.
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.
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.
TFA Missed all but T.I.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
I bought a TI SR-10 calculator in 1972. At the time, it was $99.95 plus tax. It did come with a zip up carrying case with a belt loop. I worked for months mowing lawns, picking up pop bottles, using the school's IBM 360 to handicap football games and selling the results, and so on to get that $100.
Yes, I was the penultimate nerd on that first Monday of school following my glorious purchase. Pocket protector, calculator, horn-rimmed glasses, hair with permanent cowlicks...I was something to behold. BUT, I had my CALCULATOR!! It could do things my slipstick couldn't. I, too, wondered when the school would "outlaw" this technology.
And, I was the coolest nerd in school...for a whole week whereupon my best friend Bill showed up with HIS TI SR-10. I wanted to kill him, preferably in a chem lab explosion, for several days. We spent the next year and a half trying to one-up each other with the cool stuff we could do with our magic black boxes with red numbers.
*SIGH*
I am my own gestalt.
While we lived in Japan, I went to an american DODDS (dept of defense) school on the base. In math class, for several years, we had this Japanese guy come in and teach us how to use the sorobans. He told us that he could do high math in his head (high for 6th/7th grade, but can you do 9 digit multiplication in your head?), and would challenge students to a match. He and the student would go stand in the hall, while the class came up with a problem. Two 9 digit numbers to multiply, a long list of 8 and 9 digit numbers to add with one or two thrown in to subtract, etc...he and the student would come back in the room, the student got a calculator, and he would have the answer before the student got the numbers punched into the calculator. I still would not believe it if I hadn't seen it.