The first calculators were abacuses, and were often constructed as awooden frame with beads sliding on wires. Abacuses were in usecenturies before the adoption of the written Arabic numerals system andare still used by some merchants, fishermen and clerks in China andelsewhere.
William Oughtred invents the slide rule in 1622 and is revealed by his student Richard Delamain in 1630.[1] Wilhelm Schickard built the first automatic calculator called the "Calculating Clock" in 1623. [2]Some 20 years later, in 1643, French philosopher Blaise Pascal invented the calculation device later known as the Pascaline, which was used for taxes in France until 1799. The German philosopher G.W.v. Leibniz also produced a calculating machine.
Charles Babbagedeveloped the concept further, leading the way to programmablecomputers, but the machine he built was too heavy to be operable.
The last quarter of the 19th century saw major developments in mechanical calculators:
The first half of the 20th century saw the gradual development ofthe mechanical calculator mechanisms that had already been invented,though there were some significant innovations.
The Dalton adding-listing machine introduced in 1902 was the firstof its type to use only ten keys, and became the first of manydifferent models of "10-key add-listers" manufactured by many companies.
In 1948 the miniature Curta calculator, that was held in one hand for operation, was introduced after being developed by Curt Herzstark in a Nazi concentration camp. This was an extreme development of the stepped-gear calculating mechanism.
From the early 1900s through the 1960s, mechanical calculators dominated the desktop computing market (see History of computing hardware). Major suppliers in the USA included Friden, Monroe, and SCM/Marchant.(Some comments about European calculators follow below.) These deviceswere motor-driven, and had movable carriages where results ofcalculations were displayed by dials. Nearly all keyboards were full— each digit that could be entered had its own column of nine keys,1..9, plus a column-clear key, permitting entry of several digits atonce. (See the illustration of a 1914 mechanical calculator.) One couldcall this parallel entry, by way of contrast with ten-key serial entrythat was commonplace in mechanical adding machines, and is nowuniversal in electronic calculators. (Nearly all Fridencalculators had a ten-key auxiliary keyboard for entering themultiplier when doing multiplication.) Full keyboards generally had tencolumns, although some lower-cost machines had eight. Most machinesmade by the three companies mentioned did not print their results,although other companies, such as Olivetti, did make printingcalculators.
In these machines, Addition and subtraction were performed in a single operation, as on a conventional adding machine, but multiplication and division were accomplished by repeated mechanical additions and subtractions. Fridenmade a calculator that also provided square roots, basically by doingdivision, but with added mechanism that automatically incremented thenumber in the keyboard in a systematic fashion. Friden and Marchant (Model SKA) made calculators with square root. Handheld mechanical calculators such as the 1948 Curta continued to be used until they were displaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s.
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The Facit, Triumphator, and Walther calculators shown alongside aretypical European machines. Similar-looking machines included the Odhnerand Brunsviga, among others. Although these are operated by handcranks,there were, of course, motor-driven versions. Most machines that looklike these use the Odhner mechanism, or variations of it. The OlivettiDivisumma did all four basic operations of arithmetic, and has aprinter. Full-keyboard machines, including motor-driven ones, were alsoused in Europe for many decades. Some European machines, probably rare,had as many as 20 columns in their full keyboards.
The first main-frame computers, using firstly vacuum tubes and later transistorsin the logic circuits, appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s. Thistechnology was to provide a stepping stone to the development ofelectronic calculators.
In 1954, IBM, in the U.S.A., demonstrated a large all-transistor calculator and, in 1957, the company released the first commercial all-transistor calculator, the IBM 608, though it was housed in several cabinets and cost about $80,000[1].
The Casio Computer Co., in Japan, released the Model 14-Acalculator in 1957, which was the world‘s first all-electric "compact"calculator. It did not use electronic logic but was based on relay technology, and was built into a desk.
In October 1961, the world‘s first all-electronic desktop calculator, the Bell Punch/Sumlock Comptometer ANITA (A New Inspiration To Arithmetic/Accounting) was announced.[3][4] This British designed-and-built machine used vacuum tubes, cold-cathode tubes and Dekatrons in its circuits, with 12 cold-cathode "Nixie"-typetubes for its display. Two models were displayed, The Mk VII forcontinental Europe and the Mk VIII for Britain and the rest of theworld, both for delivery from early 1962. The Mk VII was a slightlyearlier design with a more complicated mode of multiplication and wassoon dropped in favour of the simpler Mark VIII version. The ANITA hada full keyboard, similar to mechanical Comptometers of the time, a feature that was unique to it and the later Sharp CS-10A among electronic calculators. Bell Punch had been producing key-driven mechanical calculators of the Comptometertype under the names "Plus" and "Sumlock", and had realised in themid-1950s that the future of calculators lay in electronics. Theyemployed the young graduate Norbert Kitz, who had worked on the earlyBritish Pilot ACE computer project, to lead the development. The ANITA sold well since it was the only electronic desktop calculator available, and was silent and quick.
The tube technology of the ANITA was superseded in June 1963, by the U.S. manufactured Friden EC-130, which had an all-transistor design, 13-digit capacity on a 5-inch CRT, and introduced reverse Polish notation (RPN)to the calculator market for a price of $2200, which was about triplethe cost of an electromechanical calculator of the time. Like BellPunch, Friden was a manufacturer of mechanical calculators that haddecided that the future lay in electronics. In 1964 more all-transistorelctronic calculators were introduced: Sharp introduced the CS-10A,which weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost 500,000 yen (~US$2500), andIndustria Macchine Elettroniche of Italy introduced the IME 84, towhich several extra keyboard and display units could be connected sothat several people could make use of it (but apparently not at thesame time).
There followed a series of electronic calculator models from theseand other manufacturers, including Canon, Mathatronics, Olivetti, SCM(Smith-Corona-Marchant), Sony, Toshiba, and Wang. The early calculatorsused hundreds of Germanium transistors, since these were then cheaper than Silicon transistors, on multiple circuit boards. Display types used were CRT, cold-cathode Nixie tubes, and filament lamps. Memory technology was usually based on the delay line memory or the magnetic core memory, though the Toshiba "Toscal" BC-1411 appears to use an early form of dynamic RAM built from discrete components. Already there was a desire for smaller and less power-hungry machines.
The Monroe Epicprogrammable calculator came on the market in 1967. A large, printing,desk-top unit, with an attached floor-standing logic tower, it wascapable of being programmed to perform many computer-like functions.However, the only branch instruction was an impliedunconditional branch (GOTO) at the end of the operation stack,returning the program to its starting instruction. Thus, it was notpossible to include any conditional branch(IF-THEN-ELSE) logic. During this era, the absence of the conditionalbranch was sometimes used to distinguish a programmable calculator froma computer.
The electronic calculators of the mid-1960s were large and heavy desktop machines due to their use of hundreds of transistorson several circuit boards with a large power consumption that requiredan AC power supply. There were great efforts to put the logic requiredfor a calculator into fewer and fewer integrated circuits (chips) and calculator electronics was one of the leading edges of semiconductordevelopment. U.S. semiconductor manufacturers led the world in LargeScale Integration (LSI) semiconductor development, squeezing more andmore functions into individual integrated circuits. This led toalliances between Japanese calculator manufacturers and U.S.semiconductor companies: Canon Inc. with Texas Instruments, Hayakawa Electric (later known as Sharp Corporation) with North-American Rockwell Microelectronics, Busicom with Mostek and Intel, and General Instrument with Sanyo.
By 1970 a calculator could be made using just a few chips of lowpower consumption, allowing portable models powered from rechargeablebatteries. The first portable calculators appeared in Japan in 1970,and were soon marketed around the world. These included the SanyoICC-0081 "Mini Calculator", the Canon Pocketronic, and the Sharp QT-8B"micro Compet". The Canon Pocketronic was a development of the"Cal-Tech" project which had been started at Texas Instrumentsin 1965 as a research project to produce a portable calculator. ThePocketronic has no traditional display; numerical output is on thermalpaper tape. As a result of the "Cal-Tech" project Texas instruments wasgranted master patents on portable calculators.
Sharp put in great efforts in size and power reduction and introduced in January 1971 the Sharp EL-8,also marketed as the Facit 1111, which was close to being a pocketcalculator. It weighed about one pound, had a vacuum fluorescentdisplay, rechargeable NiCad batteries, and initially sold for $395.
However, the efforts in integrated circuit development culminated inthe introduction in early 1971 of the first "calculator on a chip", theMK6010 by Mostek,[5]followed by Texas Instruments later in the year. Although these earlyhand-held calculators were very expensive, these advances inelectronics, together with developments in display technology (such asthe vacuum fluorescent display, LED, and LCD), lead within a few years to the cheap pocket calculator available to all.
The first truly pocket-sized electronic calculator was the Busicom LE-120A "HANDY", which was marketed early in 1971. Made in Japan, this was also the first calculator to use an LED display, the first hand-held calculator to use a single integrated circuit (then proclaimed as a "calculator on a chip"), the MostekMK6010, and the first electronic calculator to run off replaceablebatteries. Using four AA-size cells the LE-120A measures 4.9x2.8x0.9 in(124x72x24 mm).
The first American-made pocket-sized calculator, the Bowmar 901B (popularly referred to as The Bowmar Brain), measuring 5.2×3.0×1.5 in (131×77×37 mm), came out in the fall of 1971, with four functions and an eight-digit red LED display, for $240, while in August 1972 the four-function Sinclair Executivebecame the first slimline pocket calculator measuring 5.4×2.2×0.35 in(138×56×9 mm) and weighing 2.5 oz (70g). It retailed for around $150 (GB£79). By the end of the decade, similar calculators were priced less than $10 (GB£5).
The first Soviet-made pocket-sized calculator, the "ElektronikaB3-04" was developed by the end of 1973 and sold at the beginning of1974.
One of the first low-cost calculators was the Sinclair Cambridge, launched in August 1973. It retailed for £29.95,or some £5 less in kit form. The Sinclair calculators were widelysuccessful because they were far cheaper than the competition; however,their design was flawed and their accuracy in some functions wasquestionable. The scientific programmable models were particularly poorin this respect, with the programmability coming at a heavy price in transcendental accuracy.
While all the developments leading to pocket calculators had been going on Hewlett Packard (HP)had been quietly developing its own pocket calculator. Launched inearly 1972 it was unlike the other basic four-function pocketcalculators then available in that it was the first pocket calculatorwith scientific functions that could replace a slide rule. The $395 HP-35, along with all later HP engineering calculators, used reverse Polish notation(RPN), also called postfix notation. A calculation like "8 plus 5" is,using RPN, performed by pressing "8", "Enter↑", "5", and "+"; insteadof the algebraic infix notation: "8", "+", "5", "=").
The first Soviet scientific pocket-sized calculator the "B3-18" was completed by the end of 1975.
In 1973, Texas Instruments(TI) introduced the SR-10, (SR signifying slide rule) an algebraic entry pocket calculator for $150. It was followed the next year by the SR-50 which added log and trig functions to compete with the HP-35, and in 1977 the mass-marketed TI-30 line which is still produced.
The first programmable pocket calculator was the HP-65,in 1974; it had a capacity of 100 instructions, and could store andretrieve programs with a built-in magnetic card reader. A year laterthe HP-25C introduced continuous memory, i.e. programs and data were retained in CMOS memory during power-off. In 1979, HP released the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable calculator, the HP-41C. It could be expanded with RAM (memory) and ROM (software) modules, as well as peripherals like bar code readers, microcassette and floppy disk drives, paper-roll thermal printers, and miscellaneous communication interfaces (RS-232, HP-IL, HP-IB).
The first Soviet programmable calculator "B3-21" was developed by the end of 1977 and sold at the beginning of 1978.
Mechanical calculators continued to be sold, though in rapidlydecreasing numbers, into the early 1970s, and many of the famousmanufacturers closed down or were taken over. Comptometertype calculators were often retained for much longer to be used foradding and listing duties, especially in accounting, since a trainedand skilled operator could enter all the digits of a number in onemovement of the hands on a Comptometerquicker than was possible serially with a 10-key electronic calculator.The spread of the computer rather than the simple electronic calculatorput an end to the Comptometer. Also, by the end of the 1970s, the slide rule had become obsolete and disappeared as the calculator of choice.
Through the 1970s the hand-held electronic calculator underwent rapid development. The red LED and blue/green vacuum-fluorescent displays consumed a lot of power and the calculators either had a short battery life (often measured in hours, so rechargeable Nickel-Cadmium batteries were common) or were large so that they could take larger, higher capacity batteries. In the early 1970s Liquid Crystal Displays(LCDs) were in their infancy and there was a great deal of concern thatthey only had a short operating lifetime. Busicom was a very innovativecompany and when they introduced the Busicom LE-120A "HANDY" calculator, the first pocket-sized calculator and the first with an LED display, they also announced the Busicom LC with LCDdisplay. However, there were problems with this display and thecalculator never went on sale. The first successful calculators with LCDs were manufactured by Rockwell International and sold from 1972 by other companies under such names as: Dataking LC-800, Harden DT/12, Ibico 086, Lloyds 40, Lloyds 100, Prismatic 500 (aka P500), Rapid Data Rapidman 1208LC. The LCDswere an early form with the numbers appearing as silver against a darkbackground. To present a high-contrast display these models illuminatedthe LCDusing a filament lamp and solid plastic light guide, which negated thelow power consumption of the display. These models appear to have beensold only for a year or two.
A much more successful series of calculators using the reflective LCD display was launched in 1972 by Sharp Inc with the Sharp EL-805,which was a slim pocket calculator. This, and another few similarmodels, used Sharp‘s "COS" (Crystal on Substrate) technology. This useda glass-like circuit board which was also an integral part of the LCD.In operation the user actually looked through this "circuit board" atthe numbers being displayed. The "COS" technology may have been tooexpensive since it was only used in a few models before Sharp revertedto conventional circuit boards, though all the models with thereflective LCD displays are often referred to as "COS".
In the mid-1970s the first calculators appeared with the now "normal" LCDs with dark numerals against a grey background, though the early ones often had a yellow filter over them to cut out damaging UV rays. The big advantage of the LCDis that it is passive and reflects light, which requires much lesspower than generating light. This led the way to the firstcredit-card-sized calculators, such as the Casio Mini Card LC-78 of 1978, which could run for months of normal use on a couple of button cells.
There were also steady improvements to the electronics inside thecalculators. All of the logic functions of a calculator had beensqueezed into the first "Calculator on a chip" integrated circuitsin 1971, but this was leading edge technology of the time and yieldswere low and costs were high. Many calculators continued to use two ormore integrated circuits (ICs), especially the scientific and the programmable ones, into the late 1970s.
The power consumption of the integrated circuits was also reduced, especially with the introduction of CMOS technology. Appearing in the Sharp "EL-801" in 1972, the transistors in the logic cells of CMOS ICs only used any apreciable power when they changed state. The LED and VFD displays had often required additional driver transistors or ICs, whereas the LCD displays were more amenable to being driven directly by the calculator IC itself.
With this low power consumption came the possibility of using solar cells as the power source, realised around 1978 by such calculators as the Royal Solar 1, Sharp EL-8026, and Teal Photon.
At the beginning of the 1970s hand-held electronic calculators werevery expensive, costing two or three weeks‘ wages, and so were a luxuryitem. The high price was due to their construction requiring manymechanical and electronic components which were expensive to produce,and production runs were not very large. Many companies, large andsmall, saw that there were good profits to be made in the calculatorbusiness with the margin on these high prices. However, inexorably, thecost of calculators fell as components and their production techniquesimproved, and the effect of economies of scale were felt.
By 1976 the cost of the cheapest 4-function pocket calculator haddropped to a few dollars, about one twentieth of the cost 5 yearsearlier. The consequences of this were firstly that the pocketcalculator was affordable to practically everyone, and secondly that itwas now difficult for the manufacturers to make a profit out ofcalculators, leading to many companies dropping out of the business orclosing down altogether. The companies that survived making calculatorstended to be those with high outputs of higher quality calculators, orproducing high-specification scientific and programmable calculators.
The first calculator capable of symbolic computation was the HP-28, released in 1987. It was able to, for example, solve quadratic equations symbolically. The first graphing calculator was the Casio fx7000G released in 1985.
The two leading manufacturers, HP and TI, released increasinglyfeature-laden calculators during the 1980s and 1990s. At the turn ofthe millennium, the line between a graphing calculator and a handheld computer was not always clear, as some very advanced calculators such as the TI-89 and HP-49G could differentiate and integrate functions, run word processing and PIM software, and connect by wire or IR to other calculators/computers.
The HP 12cfinancial calculator is still produced. It was introduced in 1981 andis still being made with few changes. The HP 12c featured the reverse Polish notationmode of data entry. In 2003 several new models were released, includingan improved version of the HP 12c, the "HP 12c platinum edition" whichadded more memory, more built-in functions, and the addition of thealgebraic mode of data entry.
Online calculators are programs designed to work just like a normalcalculator does. Usually the keyboard (or the mouse clicking a virtualnumpad) is used, but other means of input (e.g. slide bars) arepossible.
Thanks to the Internet, many new types of calculators are possiblefor calculations that would otherwise be much more difficult orimpossible, such as for real time currency exchange rates, loan ratesand statistics.
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