Calculator History

Math tests will never be the same!

Early calculators

Now we all learned about the Abacus in grade school math and history, so we need not cover the same ground. The Chinese invented and still use them today, I got it. Lets take a look at mechanical, tube and solid-state calculators and their history that holds a few stories that might surprise you.

The first calculators

Mechanical calculators are the first modern machines that truly process mathematics. If you are wondering how computers relate, you should know that up until the construction of Eniac, the first electronic computer, the people that ran calculators were called the computers. By extension a computer is a machine that runs calculators, simple right? So as a result the two are used interchangeably for the most part.

1623 - Wilhelm Schickard, of Germany, builds the first mechanical calculator. Kepler, the man who later discovers that the universe doesn't revolve around earth, uses Schickard's device to facilitate his conclusions. (Schickard's machine is part of the same German tech bubble that includes Guttenberg's printing press.)

1801 - Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents the punch card and a cloth loom based computer system. The same Jacquard that the silk fabric is named after.

1833 - Charles Babbage builds on Jacquard's work and invents the Difference and the Analytical engine. The same Babbage after which the software store is named, Charles introduces the term 'engine' to computation. (Hence, websites such as Google being referred to as search engines.)

1890 - For the first time, the United States uses punch cards to more accurately tabulate the results of the Census Bureau.

Modern calculator development

With the onset of World War II, the need to facilitate a revolution in calculating was accelerated. That stated, there were highly efficient mechanical calculators from this era that remained in use through the early nineties in some specialized industries.

1939 - The Harvard Mark I, developed in part by IBM, is the first modern digital computer. It should be noted that the Mark I is modeled in part after Babbage's Analytical Engine.

1954 - IBM creates the first non-tube solid-state calculator called Anita.

1963 - Friden releases a  $2200 55LBS calculator that has a 5" CRT monitor.

1964 - Sharp Calculators offers a similar model to the Friden Calculator in Japan for $2500.

Pocket calculators

1971 - Sharp introduces the First Pocket Calculator dubbed the EL-8. The unit weighs a pound and costs $395. (Consider now a PDA often provides calculator software for free.)

1974 - Hewlett-Packard introduces the first scientific calculator. It had an instruction 100-entry instruction capacity and a magnetic card reader.

Since the eighties, Texas Instruments and HP have introduced increasingly complex multi-featured calculators. Graphing, Scientific and Mortgage Calculators are the biggest sellers. These innovative calculators have a computational power equal to most PDAs.

More information on calculators