News Flash, Calculators Aren’t Dead Yet
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It’s amazing sometimes how far things have come in technology. I remember a time back in the early 1970’s when the first digital calculators came out. Texas Instruments built most of them, HP followed soon after and then there were more. Progress was slow at first, a simple calculator that didn’t have ANY memory and only had four basic functions would cost upwards of $100. They had red LED readouts and needed a nine volt battery to power them. Things like programmable engineering calculators just didn’t exist, jobs like that were done with a slide rule or pen and paper.
Later on, they started showing up with a percent key, some started having a memory. More and more functions were built into them. I think it probably wasn’t until the middle 1980’s before the first actual engineering calculators were seen in the wild.
Progress continued and it wasn’t much longer before scientific and engineering calculators began to grow more and more functions and became much more programmable. Somewhere in the early 1980’s they red LED’s gave way to Liquid Crystal. This meant the batteries would last a LOT longer.
I was looking at calculators recently and had an interesting thought, what if one of today’s top of the line programmable scientific / business / engineering calculators with graphing displays and a combo solar / battery power supply (and it’s instruction manuals) were to show up say, on Einstein’s desk back in like 1905 when he was writing the special theory of relativity.
Do you suppose we’d have warp drive and transporters now if he’d had access to something like that?
Interesting thought no?
Technorati Tags: einstein, calculator, scientific calculator, technology, engineering calculator, liquid crystal, led, digital calculator
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
