Slashdot Mirror
This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race (twitter.com)
An anonymous reader shares a thread [Editor's note: all links in the story will lead you to Twitter]: In the 1970s the cost -- and size -- of calculators tumbled. Business tools became toys; as a result prestige tech companies had to rapidly diversify into other products -- or die! This is the story of the 1970s great calculator race... Compact electronic calculators had been around since the mid-1960s, although 'compact' was a relative term. They were serious, expensive tools for business. So it was quite a breakthrough in 1967 when Texas Instruments presented the Cal-Tech: a prototype battery powered 'pocket' calculator using four integrated circuits. It sparked a wave of interest. Canon was one of the first to launch a pocket calculator in 1970. The Pocketronic used Texas Instruments integrated circuits, with calculations printed on a roll of thermal paper. Sharp was also an early producer of pocket calculators. Unlike Canon they used integrated circuits from Rockwell and showed the calculation on a vacuum fluorescent display. The carrying handle was a nice touch!
The next year brought another big leap: the Hewlet-Packard HP35. Not only did it use a microprocessor it was also the first scientific pocket calculator. Suddenly the slide rule was no longer king; the 35 buttons of the HP35 had taken its crown. The most stylish pocket calculator was undoubtedly the Olivetti Divisumma 18, designed by Mario Bellini. Its smooth look and soft shape has become something of a tech icon and an inspiration for many designers. It even featured in Space:1999! By 1974 Hewlett Packard had created another first: the HP-65 programmable pocket calculator. Programmes were stored on magnetic cards slotted into the unit. It was even used during the Apollo-Soyuz space mission to make manual course corrections. The biggest problem for pocket calculators was the power drain: LED displays ate up batteries. As LCD displays gained popularity in the late 1970s the size of battery needed began to reduce. The 1972 Sinclair Executive had been the first pocket calculator to use small circular watch batteries, allowing the case to be very thin. Once LCD displays took off watch batteries increasingly became the norm for calculators. Solar power was the next innovation for the calculator: Teal introduced the Photon in 1977, no batteries required or supplied!
But the biggest shake-up of the emerging calculator market came in 1975, when Texas Instruments -- who made the chips for most calculator companies -- decided to produce and sell their own models. As a vertically integrated company Texas Instruments could make and sell calculators at a much lower price than its competitors. Commodore almost went out of business trying to compete: it was paying more for its TI chips than TI was selling an entire calculator for. With prices falling the pocket calculator quickly moved from business tool to gizmo: every pupil, every student, every office worker wanted one, especially when they discovered the digital fun they could have! Calculator games suddenly became a 'thing', often combining a calculator with a deck of cards to create new games to play. Another popular pastime was finding numbers that spelt rude words if the calculator was turned upside down; the Samsung Secal even gave you a clue to one!
The calculator was quickly evolving into a lifestyle accessory. Hewlett Packard launched the first calculator watch in 1977... Casio launched the first credit card sized calculator in 1978, and by 1980 the pocket calculator and pocket computer were starting to merge. Peak calculator probably came in 1981, with Kraftwerk's Pocket Calculator released as a cassingle in a calculator-shaped box. Although the heyday of the pocket calculator may be over they are still quite collectable. Older models in good condition with the original packaging can command high prices online. So let's hear it for the pocket calculator: the future in the palm of your hand!
The next year brought another big leap: the Hewlet-Packard HP35. Not only did it use a microprocessor it was also the first scientific pocket calculator. Suddenly the slide rule was no longer king; the 35 buttons of the HP35 had taken its crown. The most stylish pocket calculator was undoubtedly the Olivetti Divisumma 18, designed by Mario Bellini. Its smooth look and soft shape has become something of a tech icon and an inspiration for many designers. It even featured in Space:1999! By 1974 Hewlett Packard had created another first: the HP-65 programmable pocket calculator. Programmes were stored on magnetic cards slotted into the unit. It was even used during the Apollo-Soyuz space mission to make manual course corrections. The biggest problem for pocket calculators was the power drain: LED displays ate up batteries. As LCD displays gained popularity in the late 1970s the size of battery needed began to reduce. The 1972 Sinclair Executive had been the first pocket calculator to use small circular watch batteries, allowing the case to be very thin. Once LCD displays took off watch batteries increasingly became the norm for calculators. Solar power was the next innovation for the calculator: Teal introduced the Photon in 1977, no batteries required or supplied!
But the biggest shake-up of the emerging calculator market came in 1975, when Texas Instruments -- who made the chips for most calculator companies -- decided to produce and sell their own models. As a vertically integrated company Texas Instruments could make and sell calculators at a much lower price than its competitors. Commodore almost went out of business trying to compete: it was paying more for its TI chips than TI was selling an entire calculator for. With prices falling the pocket calculator quickly moved from business tool to gizmo: every pupil, every student, every office worker wanted one, especially when they discovered the digital fun they could have! Calculator games suddenly became a 'thing', often combining a calculator with a deck of cards to create new games to play. Another popular pastime was finding numbers that spelt rude words if the calculator was turned upside down; the Samsung Secal even gave you a clue to one!
The calculator was quickly evolving into a lifestyle accessory. Hewlett Packard launched the first calculator watch in 1977... Casio launched the first credit card sized calculator in 1978, and by 1980 the pocket calculator and pocket computer were starting to merge. Peak calculator probably came in 1981, with Kraftwerk's Pocket Calculator released as a cassingle in a calculator-shaped box. Although the heyday of the pocket calculator may be over they are still quite collectable. Older models in good condition with the original packaging can command high prices online. So let's hear it for the pocket calculator: the future in the palm of your hand!
It was an HP calculator which rode along on the Space Shuttle.
https://airandspace.si.edu/col...
Now this is a nerd story we can all enjoy.
I bought what I could afford a T.I. SR-56, the year I graduated from High School. There was no way I could afford a full computer. I spent a lot of time programming that thing.
I was interested in the material until I realized every link was to a tweet. We can do better than this.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Every single link in the summary points to the same Twitter account. @PulpLibrarian isn't very anonymous, but he's a coward for the lame attempt.
I have a HP-15C purchased in 1985 and it is still running on the original batteries - 32 years!
That is phenomenal low power design for the technology and knowledge at the time.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now: Only a few manufacturers are left, and even fewer manufacture them to the same standards as the best older slide rules. I still have one, which I keep as an heirloom.
It was years later before I could afford a calculator without an equal key that blew the stack when you pressed it.
My first was an HP-11c. Damn fine calculator, they still sell on the used market for a lot to people who actually use them.
There is even a company, SwissMicros, selling a modern clone of the HP-15c, and other very nice RPN calculators.
... I was in Memphis, Tenn. studying electronics using a slide rule.
Our classroom had a LARGE one above the blackboard, kinda like the large alphabet signs in grade school.
As an extension of the physics portion, I became enthralled by Special Relativity (SR).
I did a deep dive and manipulated the math to gain an intuitive real-world feel for SR.
A huge fucking problem was extracting square root.
SR only manifests itself at high percentages of the speed of light in a vacuum.
A slide rule was useless when going for lots of decimal places, so I extracted square root by hand using paper and pencil.
It was very painful.
I'd have to perform the calculation three (3) times to verify that I had not made a mistake.
I often asked myself, "Am I trying to understand SR or trying to learn how to successfully find the goddam square root?"
It was a massive speed bump.
The first time I saw a "pocket" calculator, an officer was wearing one aboard the aircraft carrier.
It had four functions: add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
It looked like those goddam Motorola cell phones where the antenna tickled your arm pit.
$1,000.
Later, I bought a TI for $100 and it was an improvement because it also had one memory and ... SQUARE ROOT!.
Thank you Jesus!
At last, I could skate right by the speed bump and begin to grok SR.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
My dad's friend was a gadget hound, and had one of these in the 80's. Not a great machine. The keys were weird and mushy. It had no electronic display. It only had a thermal printer that printed shiny dark gray numbers on shiny light gray paper. In other words, visibility was poor. It looked amazing, though, and you could spill a coke on it and the keys would still work.
Much more impressive but more utilitarian - he had a completely electro-mechanical rotary auto-dial telephone. It took small, hard plastic punch cards you'd put the number on. You'd push the card into a slot on the telephone, and it would feed the card in and out, generating pulses until it got to the number you punched out. Then it would pull the card back in and do it again for the next number until the whole number was dialed. No digital anything, just relays and motors.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
(To be read upside down on an old calculator)
I remember that one - it was my first calculator. I used it - or tried to in my college Physics class back in 74 but they refused to let me use it for exams! The made me use a slide-rule because they considered calculators "cheating". It wasn't for another couple years that you could get away with using a calculator for exams. Times have thankfully changed !
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
One day when we are all using google glass there will be a nostalgia article about how everyone had a phone in their pockets.
OK I kid. Google Glass is never going to takeover but some form of Augmented reality based interface will take over from a slab of glass interface.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Do androids count with RPN?
I think you mean
Count RPN with androids do?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
They left out the other significant development in cheap calculators, the built-in solar power which meant no batteries at all.
You must have missed it. From tfa, solar power was the next innovation for the calculator: Teal introduced the Photon in 1977, no batteries required or supplied!
This is followed by an image of an advertisement for the Photon. Surprising is an error in the ad copy:
[Because of our awesome QC process,] the defect rate is an unprecedented low of less than one out of every 200 pieces (or .05%)!
One might expect a calculator company to avoid arithmetic errors.
Like the iPod, the TI calculators were not great, but they were very easy to use. The HP calculators were and are beatiful. But ease of use won out.
Another thing that won out was until about a decade ago all TI calculators were very limited. This made them ideal machines for tests. HP calculators could do unit analsys, and since 1990 they had algebra systems, and could even do calculus. This made them the ideal machine for technical students and professionals, but no high school would waste time teaching it because all they care about is filling out bubbles on an answer sheet.
The interesting contemporary issue that I see is that schools are still teaching calculators when really smart phones can do everything and more, especially with apps like Wolfram Alpha. Unless you are a legacy HP user, asking kids to buy a calculator just to boosts TI profits seems very wasteful to me. This is going to change as more tests move to online format, and online resources such as Desmos take over the physical clacultor, but in the meantime the taxpayer is on the hook for millions of dollars a year per large school district just for legacy technology.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Concise (Japan) sill makes them:
eg. https://www.sliderule.tokyo/pr...
You could buy new Faber-Castells online until last year.
No sig today...
How many kids today actually write programs for their phone?
sustainable living
An interesting NHK World documentary about Japanese calculator culture and the history of calculators in Japan. I generally watch these at speed = 1.5.
Begin Japanology (13 June 2013) - Calculators
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
The problem with bits and ratcheting handles is that they are much more prone to wearing out the screw than fixed screwdrivers. Bits also tend to fall out of the handles at inconvenient times and to disappear somewhere in smal holes and openings and to shortcut something there. If you look at the professionals, they seldom use bits, but have dedicated screwdrivers for each size.
Depends on the screwdriver. I've seen at least one that uses a pin to lock the bit in so that it can't fall out during use.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Agreed! We have 2 kids in high school who both need TI 83 or 84 series calculators for class, and it's kind of ridiculous how much money those things fetch, even on the used market, JUST because so many school districts have standardized on them.
At our oldest kid's high school, they supposedly provide loaners for the kids who don't have or can't afford their own, but it's become HIGHLY discouraged because so many kids were stealing the loaners and reselling them. (Even on Amazon, when you look at reviews of used ones sold by individuals on there, you often see complaints that one arrived with a "Property of XXX School District" decal stuck to the bottom of it.")
It's far cheaper to buy a TI 83 or 84 simulator app for a smartphone, or heck -- to even buy a cheap Android phone AND the app!
Who brought out his range in 1972.
TI introduced their SR-10 calculator in 1972, not 1975. I bought one in 1973. It could do SQUARE and SQUARE ROOT in addition to the four basic functions, for around $100. A marvel!
They released the SR-50 calculator, full trig-log capable, in 1974. I replaced my SR-10 with one of these before going off to college.
I graduated with a BS in engineering in late 1970 and entered the Air Force in 1971. In mid 1973, I took a graduate course in E.E. at a university in Ohio near where I was stationed at that time. I was very surprised, when at the first session of the class, there were only two people in the course that HAD Slide Rules. Me, with my trusty K&E log log duplex decitrig, and the professor teaching the course! Every one else taking the course had a scientific calculator.
I think the professor noticed and may have cut me a little slack! However, after that course was over, when the TI-35's broke through the $$100 level at the BX on base I was first in line for one.
The scientific calculator with its multi-line LCD screen will be around for a long time yet.
I'm sure it will but frankly they ceased being of much utility to me the moment I graduated from college despite working as an engineer for the last 20+ years. Any calculations I need to do are almost always easier and faster to do with the vastly more powerful PC sitting on my desk. I still have several old TI and HP calculators but I'm sure the batteries in them died years ago and I honestly cannot remember the last time I pulled one out to use. I have an old slide rule too that doesn't get any love either. I'm well aware there are field service jobs where they are quite useful but if you have a PC in front of you they really don't save me any time except in rare corner cases. I can (and do) replicate the functionality with an app on my PC or smartphone should the need ever arise.
I'm both an engineer and an accountant and do some of both in my day job. You would be astonished how many accountants still rely on paper tape calculators even when they have a perfectly functional and far more useful spreadsheet sitting right in front of them. First thing I did at my current job was to throw all the paper tape calculators the company had in the dumpster because those things are a terrible idea that people only use because they don't know any better.