Remember what an exciting breakthrough pocket calculators were?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.calculator.org/Pages/article.aspx?name=A%20First%20Calculator

It is difficult to imagine or remember now what an exciting breakthrough pocket calculators were. This was in the days before computers of any kind, let alone personal ones, were available to the public. There really was no way of accurately calculating, say 3834534/34582. The most common approximation was to use tables - booklets full of pre-calculated logarithms and trancendental functions. That would give you about four digits of accuracy (five figure tables were too much trouble to use). If you learned how to use one, a slide-rule was quicker, but was really only accurate to two or three digits. Mechanical calculating machines, where available, were basically expensive adding machines. Multiplication was a case of repeated addition with much handle cranking, possibly even motor-driven. For division it started to get silly, winding a handle until a bell rang, change some settings and repeat until the calculation is complete. As for long division, I don't think I have ever used this in a calculation which was not for the purpose of learning long division. Does anyone have a calculator?

The pocket calculator meant freedom. It was a warrant for release from the drudgery of longhand arithmetic and its associated tedium and uncertain accuracy; effective immediately. It gave the answer with no effort, almost instantly, and with more digits of precision than you knew what to do with. The early models had a noticeable delay and would visibly cause their displays to flicker as the more complex calculations progressed. This gave an even more acute sense of the arithmetic power one was unleashing on the problem at hand. In the space of a few years, a tiny box in your hand was able to do the work of ranks of clerks with mechanical calculators. Surely no piece of technology has had such a profound effect in so short a space of time - not even the PC.

The world's first pocket calculator

In 1965, Texas Instruments, who had recently developed the first integrated circuits, needed an application to demonstrate their advantages in miniaturising complex electronics, and so started development of the "CalTech" prototype pocket calculator. The completed prototype was demonstrated two years later, and it spurred a number of companies to produce commercial devices, mostly using chips manufactured by TI, long before TI themselves became a manufacturer of calculators for end-users. The early devices printed their results onto paper tape.

By 1971, a large number of manufacturers were producing calculators with LED displays, using chips manufactured by TI or the newcomer Intel. Intel's offering was actually the forerunner of the series of microprocessors used in most PCs today. The early models were expensive, but as large numbers of companies saw the size of the potential market, there began one of the most spectacular price wars in the short history of high technology. In two years, the cost of these devices had dropped by an order of magnitude. By 1974 a four function calculator could be bought for $30 (or £30 - for some reason the transatlantic technology premium always seems to track the dollar/Sterling exchange rate). The following year prices had halved again, and school students suddenly were able to afford them.

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I can remember. It was like coming out of the Dark Ages.

[HopeHoops]

1. And yet Julia was able to calculate the sets that share his name in the early 1900s.

The Mandelbrot set wasn't plotted until 1980 and it was printed on a dot matrix printer. It is just a mapping of the Julia sets that are connected (as in every point is joined to every other). The planetary orbits were known to the scientifically inclined at least 2000 years ago, but at least in the European territories it was suppressed by the church(es). Now we have 24x7 TV and the Internet. Pass the calculator and nuke me a frozen burrito.

[pokerfan]

6. the one that got me through engineering school

and the one I still have today:

[HopeHoops]

11. I've got one similar to the top one. Don't remember if it still works.

[pokerfan]

12. The rechargeable battery back on mine was worn out

I cut it apart so that I could use AAs. It's a pretty common mod for that era calculator.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv006.cgi?read=12608

Did you know that HP's code name for that family of calculators was "Woodstock?"

http://www.hpmuseum.org

[HopeHoops]

13. Didn't know that. IPN (or RPN as it was also called) takes a little while to grasp.

It makes sense, but it is still way too easy to slip into standard entry mode and have to start over.

[pokerfan]

15. RPN seems more logical to me

To me it makes more sense to have numbers pending in a stack than to have operations pending. When I took materials science I remember having to evaluate horrendously long equations and RPN kept everything straight without having to deal with a bunch of parentheses. Student using algebraic calculators always seemed to be lost.

[HopeHoops]

17. I loved using stacks. One of my favorite tricks isn't possible on today's computers.

The 6502/6510 allowed you to use an index register to access memory referenced by an address in zero page.

I needed a really fast way to implement a jump table when I pressed a key. It loaded the ASCII code into the accumulator, left shifted to double it, and transferred the result to an index register. Using the carry to decide between two zero page addresses, I had it pick up two bytes using the index register as an offset and push them on the stack. Then all I did was a RTS and BOOM - it was executing the desired code. I don't know of a faster way to accomplish that.

Machine/Assembly seems to be a dead art.

[pokerfan]

21. I learned machine language on a 6502

a Kim-1 to be precise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

It's a lost art and your story reminded me of this bit of hacker lore: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

[HopeHoops]

22. I don't know if I feel proud or deeply disturbed - I understood that.

I started with machine code also and spent countless hours counting clock cycles to determine the fastest execution possible for critical routines. Along similar lines to the story, I was trying to break the encryption on a 5 1/4" floppy for my word processor (just to make a backup copy). I relied on that program (C=64) for the first half of college and didn't want to get stuck. I forget the name of the program I was using to do the walk-through but it was a lot like "Dan's Disk Utility" on the Apple II.

So I spent hours loading sectors into a hex dump with the ASCII characters (at least the ones that display) on the right side of the screen. It was basically a seemingly endless set of loops with the accumulator or one of the two index registers holding the offset value to jump from one loop into another. After hours of keeping track of all relevant values and manually analyzing the path, the offset suddenly changed to an entirely new and unexplored area. At first I thought I had screwed up, but when I dumped the code in that sector, the ASCII on the right said "Quit now while you're ahead." I nearly passed a lung through my nose laughing.

From there it jumped back into more looping but the text had clearly accomplished what it was intended to do - I totally lost track of where I was and which values were going to be important diving into the new loops. That was just too damn funny.

[pokerfan]

23. I came to programming from a hardware background

so my code tends to be ugly and hard to maintain, even by myself. One of my first projects involved timing a random process so I had to count machine cycles so that each subroutine took the same amount of time resulting in a thread that was of consistent time no matter what path was taken. I thought it was great fun but I've always had a funny sense of fun.

I first read that Mel story as part of the http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon">jargon file, which is a fun read in its own right. It's more of an encyclopedia than a story and if you haven't seen it before will probably keep you entertained for days. It's a sort of hitchhiker's guide for computer geeks. Mel (and some other (likely) apocryphal stories are found in one of the appendices.)

[RebelOne]

2. When I was in high school in the '50s,

I would have done well in math if calculators had been invented then. Otherwise, I squeaked by with C grades in math.

[Morning Dew]

3. In 1974, our Geometry teacher had 2 desktop calculators

that we called computers - they were about the size of a Stephen King novel. Coolest thing ever for us midwest rubes.

[jakeXT]

4. They got Apollo back with slide rules

http://sliderulemuseum.com/SR_Ephemera.htm

[MiddleFingerMom]

16. There's some sort of promotional thing going on now with the reminder that NASA...

.
.
.
... got us to the Moon and back with less computing power than what you have in your smartphone.
.
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It was no time at all (it seems... in hindsight) that pocket calculators were being given away for free.
Same thing with digital wristwatches (maybe hundreds of $'s the first year or two -- then they were
a bonus with the purchase a bag of candy.
.
.
.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

5. I remember that!

I was taking a remedial math course at the local community college, and I needed one that would calculate square root...

Texas Instruments had just come out with such a machine, and my husband bought it for me!

I loved it.

And...

I still have it, and of course it still works!

:D

[Skittles]

7. I DO

I also remember my math teachers refused to let us use them :(

[dimbear]

8. One of the secrets of Carl Friedrich Gauss's success: he had a calculator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacharias_Dase

Could calculate pi to 200 places...........

[IBEWVET]

9. I remember our electronics

instructor, gave up mid semester and put his slide rule down and bought a calculator. He was tired of us answering questions to five places. My first one was a texas instrument four function with red leds.

[csziggy]

10. In the early 60s Dad leased a Wang computer to crunch numbers

For one of his consulting jobs. Ten years later everything he did with that box the size of a washing machine could be done on a gadget that fit in his pocket. He was so excited to be able to buy a calculator that could do that stuff for far less than the monthly fee for that blasted Wang.

When they cleaned out the old house, we found the instruction manual for that Wang. I still have it around here somewhere.

[DebJ]

14. Minimum wage in 1974 was $2.00 an hour. I couldn't afford

a calculator when I was taking two Accounting courses. I was struggling to keep my junk of a car on the road so I could drive 20 miles and back to after-work classes, plus pay the outrageous (sarcasm) tuition of $11 a credit hour, plus fees and books (used books were frequently available at decent rates). Most of my classmates did not have calculators, either.

I had to do my Accounting homework using columnar pads, adding long lists of figures. It took forever. If the answer wasn't correct when you were done, you didn't know if your error was theory or math calculations. Sometimes I'd repeat the process a few times before I figured it out. Took forever!

Of course, nowadays, calculators are passe for Accounting.....spreadsheets rule.

[freshwest]

18. I remember when they came out, but no excitement until I bought one that charges by sun/lamp light.

But the excitement was rather short lived for me, though. I did have a nice scientific calculator at one time. I also enjoyed buying one which was the same thickness and dimensions as a credit card. Don't see those anymore.

I'm not a fan of the one in my cell phone or in my computer's dashboard program. They're a pain. My trusty SHARP EL-376L that I've had for many years is a trusted calculator. Nothing fancy, but I've kept it close for a score of years and thousands of miles.

But you've presented a nice piece of history, there.

[Arkansas Granny]

19. Yes, and I also remember that you needed a mighty big pocket to hold them.

The first ones I saw were still a little bulky.

[saras]

20. I saw an old calculator in a surplus store a few years ago...

It was bigger than an adding machine and smaller than a cash register - I thought. It added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided. It had neon tubes with numbers that glowed orange, about an inch high, a whole bunch of digits.

It was only when I stepped back to look at it that I noticed the thirty-inch cube on the floor, connected to it. The cube was packed with layer after layer of gigantic circuit boards, an inch apart. There must have been a couple thousand ICs in the thing. It was probably quite a nice space heater.