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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')."
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.
Ha ha, I never thought about it before, but you're right. I've never seen a calculator with a back light. But in the age of the web, it is possible to find such a beast. But it is surprising that it's not more common.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You could squeeze cheat sheets into those things, too, though the memory was a bit limited...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
When my family and I were leaving Japan for good (we'd lived there on a military base) in 1990, we were at the airport, trading in all of our Yen for Dollars on the way out. The currency exchange was this little kiosk about the size of one of those old drive-thru film processing booths. Inside sat an old man and a bunch of money and counting machines.
We gave him all our Yen, change, etc... he poured the change into one hole, the bills stacked and sorted into some other machine, and out came a paper receipt, like an atm receipt. he counted the dollars, to make sure it matched the receipt.
Before he handed over the money, though, he took out his soroban (Japanese abacus, slightly different bead layout, but same idea) and checked the math of the computer on it. Then he handed us our money.
I don't think the museum is complete until they mention the TI-8X series. It dominated the school sectors and did fractions! And the fraction results didn't come out to decimals, which makes it museum-worthy.
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.
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
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.