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Math Hardware Technology

This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race (twitter.com) 187

Posted by msmash from the inside-story dept.
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!
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This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race More

This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race

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  • TI? Bah! (Score:5, Informative)

    by willoughby ( 1367773 ) on Monday September 03, 2018 @10:14PM (#57248444)

    It was an HP calculator which rode along on the Space Shuttle.

    https://airandspace.si.edu/col... [si.edu]

    • AFAIR the TI keys were known to become mechanically unresponsive after a few weeks of use.

      • That's BS. My parents sprang for an SR-11 when I was a junior in high school, and an SR-51 in college. I'm not sure if my SR-51 was an "A" or not. The SR-11 was passed on and I have no idea where it might be today. The SR-51 ran for years, although I used it less and less, and finally burned out a resistor in the power circuit; I never got it fixed.

        Never had any issue with the keys functioning on either calculator. They were workhorses. A lot of my friends had TI's as well, never heard of a key proble

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I like Casio graphic models because they are the only ones that support SI engineering units. Saves a lot of time compared to having to enter x10^-9. Their non-graphic ones used to have those units as shift functions on some keys but they removed it a few years back.

      • I also liked Casio models (especially given their price), but mostly used HP for the RPN. I can't speak for TI, but HP always had an exponent key like you describe. You can try it out here online. [vichinsky.com.br] Just press 7, EEX, 4, Enter and you'll see 70,000 as the result.

        I just Googled, and even their latest "HP Prime" graphing calculator retains this button.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Yeah, EXP is okay, but if you do electronics you often need a lot of small units. So for microamps you need to press 7 EXP 9 +/-. With Casio the older ones you could do 7 SHIFT u, and on the newer ones you could have the shortcut keys on screen so it's one key. Having a "u" on screen saves a lot of space and makes the function a lot easier to read when you have lots of them.

          The graphic ones can display the SI suffixes in results too.

          • Ah, I'm a mechanical engineer, so my problem set was probably different. I never needed the calculator to know my units, as I generally just did any conversions after getting the final number - if the number was absurdly huge or small, I'd change to Pa or MPa from kPa for instance. I was keeping track of units on paper so it wasn't necessary to plug that into the calculator. Because of the way I kept track of units, RPN was almost always preferable for me compared to algebraic, but like I said I almost alwa

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by colinwb ( 827584 )
              In astronomy the practice was (still is?) to work in non-specific units and then convert the answer to the wanted units using a correction factor. There is a story that Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle made such a calculation with giving to the other the answer in non-specific units, adding that the correct factor was something like Y * 10**15, to which the other jokingly asked "multiply or divide"?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              I wish they would still make really good engineer calculators. They all seem to be focused on academia these days.

              • I'm not the field-type mechanical engineer, but the desk type. I don't really use them anymore since I have Python/MATLAB/etc available at all times. And then there's my smart phone, with my favorite old HP calculator emulator. Yeah, it's not quite the same - but for those rare calculator moments it gets the job done. I imagine I'd have something different to say if I worked in the field a lot - but I bet even those guys constantly have a laptop or something around.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ( 4475953 )

      I have a HP50g, a HP48, and a HP12 clone (Victor V12) and still find RPN and the lack of full Undo so impractical that I usually reach for one of my old Casios when I need to calculate something.

      • HP48 has undo...

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ( 4475953 )

          But you can only undo one step...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tantrum ( 261762 )

            well, with custom keys and the excellent programming abilities on the unit I would think that you could create a "unlimited" undo function by just storing every keypress into a logfile and then roll that back as you need.

            I still code a bit on my hp48gx for fun :)

  • 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.

  • glued (Score:2)

    by guygo ( 894298 )
    I had an HP-65 early on; loved programming it but the power was flaky. Then I got an HP-25 and it was glued to my side for years. Do androids count with RPN? Yes, yes they do.

  • Must we read it on Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Monday September 03, 2018 @10:28PM (#57248494) Homepage Journal
    I was interested in the material until I realized every link was to a tweet. We can do better than this.

    • Re:Must we read it on Twitter? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 03, 2018 @11:46PM (#57248732) Journal

      I realized every link was to a tweet. We can do better than this.

      Hey, if they can run the White House from Twitter, one can run Slashdot from it also.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      At least give a warning like for PDFs. I'm on mobile and every link wants to open the Twitter app.

    • Isn't it the "summary" in Slashdot the entire contents of the twits? Yes, you gotta visit the actual twits if you want to see the pics but...is that that bad?

  • Self-promotion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macraig ( 621737 ) <mark@a@craig.gmail@com> on Monday September 03, 2018 @10:33PM (#57248526)

    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.

  • HP were real engineers (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03, 2018 @10:39PM (#57248568)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mmogilvi ( 685746 )
      I replaced the batteries in my 15c for the first time a couple of years ago. And just to be clear, it has three small non-rechargable button batteries, like you would find in a watch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cyn1c77 ( 928549 )

      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.

      That's phenomenal even by today's design standards!

    • I have a casio from around the same time that's still running on its original solar cell.

    • You can run a lot of things with low use. I'm more impressed the insides of your calculator are still in one piece and haven't been corroded to hell by the batteries.

  • Not hard to figure out who you are since exactly 18 of the 18 links you posted are to your own Twitter account.

    I hope people who can be bothered with Twitter accounts show up there to give you a well-deserved really hard time.

  • This man's Navy, ca. 1965 ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Monday September 03, 2018 @11:00PM (#57248618)

    ... 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.

  • Olivetti Divisumma 18 (Score:3)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday September 03, 2018 @11:21PM (#57248666)

    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.

  • 58008618 (Score:4, Funny)

    by nuckfuts ( 690967 ) on Monday September 03, 2018 @11:32PM (#57248698)
    (To be read upside down on an old calculator)

  • I Had an HP 35 ! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TechnoGrl ( 322690 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @12:16AM (#57248798)
    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 !

  • iPhones and Google Glass (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @12:19AM (#57248812)

    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.

  • of course the high school my kid attended required a TI-84 for students.

    They left out the other significant development in cheap calculators, the built-in solar power which meant no batteries at all.

    Someone else already complained about RPN and someone else mentioned 80085 so my work is done.

    • 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.

  • chicken or the egg (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @01:53AM (#57248998) Homepage Journal
    In some ways, the electronic calculator market was created by TI and it's need to sell the new IC. There were not many applications, and one marketable application was the electronic calculator. In some ways it was like live Apple leveraging the microwave for the iPod.

    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.

    • 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

  • It’s a shame that kids today don’t learn about RPN.

  • ... first computer. Protable and programmable was more important to me than gaming.
    You could say I've been doing mobile development since 1986. :-)
    It still uses its third set of batteries.

    Hows that for battery time, hmmm?

  • Story's a bit off...
    I bought a TI SR-50 freshman year in college, 1974. I think they were introduced in 1973. Before that, the TI SR-10... 1972.

  • And the history of the mobile phone will read similarly when the kids being born today reach graduation age.

    Although what they will be "reading" that history on, is anybody's guess.

  • Japan and Calculators (Score:3)

    by Dhericean ( 158757 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @05:01AM (#57249428)
    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 [youtube.com]

  • At least the few I tried in TFA. This is a techies forum FFS. I block Facebook and Twitter.

  • I love my TI-89. I still use it daily. There's a lot to be said for multiple decades of practice on a calculator. Even the emulator of it on my phone, for when I don't have it handy, isn't the same.

    It doesn't need to be particularly fast or do huge calculations--that's what programming something else is for. But nothing beats a good calculator for immediate results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      When I was going to college, I used mine all the time. I haven't really used it since, however.

      Fricken awesome calculator though.... I had a variant firmware on mine that made it easy to write your own programs and build them with tigcc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        I have an 89 that saved my ass in college. Unfortunately it was a victim of an errant attempt at a firmware upgrade that went awry. Pretty sure I have an 83 that met the same fate. I never was able to resuscitate them.

        But with a couple kids approaching college age, it may be worthwhile to dust them off again to see if they can be resurrected.

  • In high school, we used to run calculator races (usually timing how long it took to calculate 99!). Some cheaper calculators would buzz audibly under load, or take noticeably longer when the device was cold.
    Later in college I got an HP 42 which was so much faster than everything else I got banned from competition.

  • Who brought out his range in 1972.

  • MSMASH, you fail to grasp the concept of "summary" - four substantial paragraphs? To meet the demands of faithful Slashdot readers, your summary needs it's own summary.

  • Correction to TI timings. (Score:3, Informative)

    by drstevep ( 2498222 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @08:44AM (#57250026)
    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.

  • In the early '70s, there was a company out in Santa Monica, called Compucorp (also an OEM for Monroe). They had a line of programmable (basically macro recording) calculators before either HP or TI, IIRC. There were a few models: scientific, bond trader, and surveyor, each with key functions appropriate for the trade. Big devices, as they used a 1/2" vacuum fluorescent display, and needed 4 "D"-size NiCads for portable power. Desktop versions had a mag card writer/reader to store the programs.

    Although t

  • Several folks have mentioned the poor response of TI calculator keys. Many years ago I had some kind of TI scientific calculator with keys that began to poop out. When I wrote TI about it, they said to send back the calculator (which was *far* past the warranty period). They replaced it with a new TI-35 Plus which I still use. Kudos to TI for excellent customer support.

    • They replaced it with a new TI-35 Plus which I still use. Kudos to TI for excellent customer support.

      You do know that they can do this because they cost TI virtually nothing to make. A few dollars at most. The profit margin on these things has to be enormous because all the tooling was fully depreciated years ago and it's not like they are dropping a lot of money on new designs. I'll agree it's good customer service but it wasn't like they really incurred a big expense in the process. I'm just astonished you actually bothered to contact them instead of just buying a new one.

  • I had a Datamath in 1973, and a SR-57 programmable (100 steps, 10 memories) in 1975. Those were the days.

  • First calculator that did octal and hex math (also binary). Got one when they came out, cost $50 in 1977. Still have it, still works, although the nicad battery died long ago. In a remarkable show of foresight, TI made the battery pack with a standard 9V battery connector, and provided a special battery door that let you replace the rechargeable battery with a normal 9V. I replaced it with a solar powered Casio that did a bunch more stuff, but the TI still works.

  • Slide Rule side benefit (Score:3)

    by Gim Tom ( 716904 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @09:53AM (#57250336)
    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.

  • When I began on my job in 1973, I had a mechanical calculator that needed over 20 seconds to calculate 22.000.000.000/7.

    We had a maintenance contract for it, because it needed service at least once a year.
    That contract was more expensive than buying a dozen new electronic ones for everybody in the room but we had to wait 5 years until finally somebody in management grew some brains.

    We bought our own long before that.

  • On the early, early calculator craze, but I started repairing these in 76.

    I was repairing Sharp calculators, desktop and handheld, back then, mostly the business machines, but I inherited the work on CS-10s and similar. These went into some engineering departments, replacing Monroematics and Divisumma 24s, which were being repaired a bench away from me still.

    When the CS-10s replaced the Monroematics, engineers went from setting up a calculation, execute, and go off for coffee and a cigarette, or two. Then o

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