The revolution of calculators sparked by the flight of two scientists!
In the year 1965, Jack Kilby and Patrick Haggerty of Texas Instruments sat on a flight as Haggerty explained his incredible idea for a calculator that could fit in the hand. This was ridiculously hard to imagine since at that time calculators were the size of typewriters and plugged into wall sockets for their power. Kilby, who’d co-invented the integrated circuit just seven years earlier while at TI lived to work out problems.
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Right after they landed, Kilby wanted to make a calculator that costs less than $100, and could add, subtract, multiply, divide and if possible do square roots. He chose the code name, Project Cal Tech, for this endeavor, which seemed logical as TI had previously had a Project MIT.
Rather than picking up from the previous studies of the science behind calculators, they decided to start from scratch. The task was broken into five parts: the keyboard, the memory, the processor, the power supply, and some form of output. The processing portion came down to a four-chip design, one more than was initially hoped for. The output was also tricky for the time. CRTs were out of the question, neon lights required too high a voltage and LEDs were still not bright enough. In the end, they developed a thermal printer that burned images into heat-sensitive paper.
After like twelve months, with the parts all spread out on a table,a patent application was filed resulting in US patent 3,819,921, Miniature electronic calculator, which outlined the basic design for all the calculators to follow.
TI showed the Cal Tech prototype to some companies and Canon took an interest. Canon brought it to market as the Pocketronic, releasing it in Japan in October 1970 and the US in April 1971, selling for around $150 ($910 in 2017 dollars). It had three chips and a heat-sensitive paper tape readout. It was still just handheld though, not really pocket-sized, but sold extremely well.
By then a number of other handheld calculators were also hitting the market. In November 1970, the first calculator-on-a-chip, the Mostek MK6010, was announced, followed in February 1971 by the first truly pocket-sized calculator, the Busicom LE-120A “Handy” that used the chip. That same year, TI followed with their own calculator-on-a-chip and in 1972 TI started releasing its own calculators.
In 1972 Hewlett-Packard released the HP-35, the first scientific calculator, that included scientific notation and had 35 buttons. Despite a $395 price tag, 100,000 were sold in its first year after release.
Display technology also advanced to LEDs and LCDs. In the mid-1970s, twisted nematic (TN) LCDs gave calculators the now omnipresent dark numerals on a light background while decreasing the power requirements to the point where they could run on button cells.
Prices went down as new features were coming in and sales doubled each year. In 1972, 5 million calculators were sold in the US and within ten years there were more calculators in the US than people.
Two years later, HP came out with their first programmable calculator, the HP-65. It had 100 functions and stored programs with a magnetic card reader. In the 1990s TI came out with the TI-81, a popular graphing calculator for algebra and precalculus courses and power by a Zilog Z80.
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