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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.
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.
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.