The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.

 

James Vincent, Oct 5, 2023, LRB: 

"...In 1970, when the men aboard Apollo 13, barrelling through space at thousands of miles per hour, gave their laconic report to ground control, ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem,’ Nasa summoned engineers with analogue slide rules, not digital computers, to guide the crew safely back to Earth. And the astronauts themselves were equipped with the same tool, a five-inch metal slide rule, so consistent in its design over the centuries that a mathematician from the 1600s would have been able to use it without much trouble...."

 

“You are not always going to have a calculator in your pocket!”

- lying 90s teachers

courtesy; on X, World of Engineering @engineers_feed

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When I entered engineering in 1977, calculators had burst on the scene. They were CASIO make LED calculators powered by pen cells, made in Taiwan/ ASEAN country, and smuggled...But since they were not allowed in any written examination, most of us had also bought slide rule at a princely price of Rs. 100+. Needless to say I never learned to use slide-rule in my life...I decided to sacrifice some marks by deciding to use log tables, if calculator was not permitted. 

 

Soon rules started changing and as is the case in India slowly and weirdly...calculators were allowed but of certain specifications, that is - not very complex models were permitted. Not all examinations allowed use of them etc. That was 1978-79.

 

It interesting to see how socialist "garibi-hatao" India was struggling, refusing to use calculators full scale, calculators were NOT manufactured in India, larger economy was crawling, inflation was raging with no good jobs in the system....

 

Capitalist India would be making millions of calculators for the world, creating thousands of jobs. Alas we were proud to be poor and afraid of CIA!

 

In 1980-81, computer programming was introduced as a non-credit subject and we were taught Fortran language without a single programmable calculator on the campus, let alone a computer, on table top, by a teacher who always thought he was the smartest teacher on the block and spoke English without fully opening his mouth to give an impression that he came from England.

These thoughts came to my mind when I saw publication of "Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator" by Keith Houston in 2023.

 

Belinda Lanks writes in WSJ on August 21 2023: 

"...In a book that’s long on technical details and short on compelling anecdotes, Mr. Houston’s profile of Herzstark is a notable highlight. As a salesman for his family’s factory manufacturing unwieldy calculators, Herzstark heard his customers’ calls for a truly portable machine. Not long after Herzstark hatched the idea for one, however, German troops annexed Austria. As the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, Herzstark was sent to Buchenwald. There he supervised a factory of inmates fabricating rocket parts and repairing looted calculating machines. As Herzstark later recounted, his manager urged him to pursue his Curta side project, promising: “If it is really worth something, then we will give it to the Fuhrer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.” When Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945, Herzstark took his blueprints with him and eventually produced the Curta. It was a palm-size engineering marvel but a commercial failure...

 

...The pocket calculator’s heyday would be brief compared with that of the slide rule it replaced. Even scientific calculators grew cheaper and profit margins waned. HP, despite Mr. Wozniak’s pleas to build a personal computer, refused to take the risk, only to see calculators absorbed into PCs, palmtops and, finally, smartphones. The pocket calculator sublimed, becoming “everywhere and nowhere at once,” Mr. Houston writes. “The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.” "