The source of demand was obvious

November 19, 2024 12:35 AM

However, the calculator differs from the personal computer in one very significant way: calculators slid directly down the market from pricey machines owned by organizations to birthday gifts handed out by middle-class parents. At incredible speed (far faster than computers) calculators became as commonplace as wristwatches; indeed, it wasn’t long before manufacturers put calculators in wristwatches. Though the market leaders changed rapidly as the technology advanced, there was no disruption from below, no new path blazed by a doughty band of rugged entrepreneurs. We will have to consider later just why that was the case. from A Craving for Calculation
posted by chavenet (8 comments total)

I thought the calculator on my wrist was cool, though it definitely identified me as a geek entering high school.

I trusted electronics more when they were offline, which offers less temptation to overload them with cruft.
posted by johnabbe at 12:55 AM on November 19 [3 favorites]

8008135
posted by TedW at 2:50 AM on November 19 [1 favorite]

RPN FTW
posted by whatevernot at 2:53 AM on November 19 [5 favorites]

I still have my HP48GX with 128kb ram. Learning RPN made me feel like a genius.
posted by night_train at 3:24 AM on November 19 [1 favorite]

Apologies for my earlier comment; the 12 year old in me couldn’t help it. In addition to being full of interesting factoids, the article really brought back some memories. In the late 1960s as a pre-teen I was fascinated by the mechanical adding machine my grandfather had. Push some buttons, pull a lever, and you could magically add, multiply, divide, or subtract any two numbers, even really big ones! Like, in the thousands! Even cooler was the electronic adding machine my father occasionally brought home from work, with its Nixie tube display. So high-tech! But a few years later that was eclipsed when my father brought home an HP-35 from work. I was in 5th grade and was amazed by that device and would fiddle around with it every chance I got. I had no idea what many of the buttons even did, and the afore-mentioned RPN made that calculator seem like a window into an arcane world of numbers far beyond what our math teacher was telling us about. But that nearly $400.00 price tag made the technology seem far out of reach for the average person, who rarely needed more than an adding machine anyway. (It was really cool to learn that Woz was also enamored of the HP-35.) Fast forward a few more years, and by 1980 I was one of the geeks in high school with a calculator on their wrist. And by 1984 I had my own computer: a Mac with an amazing 128K of RAM; which is how I learned about the pitfalls of buying Apple products too soon after their introduction. But that article really took me down a memory hole; thanks for sharing it!
posted by TedW at 3:52 AM on November 19 [1 favorite]

(UK) I started a computer science Bachelor's degree in 1974 after a false start 2 years earlier. Had seen the early Sinclair calculator 2 years previously but even then it was an expensive toy, a few months before that I had used a slide rule at school.

The gadget lust for a pocket calculator was immense but I had no actual use for one. Eventually in early '75 the price dropped so that a Commodore (or TI) scientific model fell within reach (even cheaper 3 months later of course...). Never really used it. Then I saw a HP RPN calculator and managed to acquire one second hand. Later I got the 16C computer scientist which I still have but now use the 48 simulator on my iphone.
posted by epo at 4:02 AM on November 19 [1 favorite]

My brother graduated from high school in 1969. His style was khakis, polyester plaid shirt, and a slide rule holstered at his side. (He ended up with Cray computers at Lawrence Livermore Lab.)
posted by kozad at 4:17 AM on November 19 [1 favorite]

My HP-11C gets used all the time and the last time I changed batteries was during the Jurassic. Awesome calculator.
posted by whatevernot at 4:32 AM on November 19