Pocket calculators

"Pocket calculator" redirects here. For the song, see Computer World.

By 1970, a calculator could be made using just a few chips of low power consumption, allowing portable models powered from rechargeable batteries. The first portable calculators appeared in Japan in 1970, and were soon marketed around the world. These included the Sanyo ICC-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 Instruments in 1965 as a research project to produce a portable calculator. The Pocketronic has no traditional display; numerical output is on thermal paper tape. As a result of the "Cal-Tech" project, Texas Instruments was granted 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 pocket calculator. It weighed 1.59 pounds (721 grams), had a vacuum fluorescent display, rechargeable NiCad batteries, and initially sold for US $395.

However, the efforts in integrated circuit development culminated in the introduction in early 1971 of the first "calculator on a chip", the MK6010 by Mostek, followed by Texas Instruments later in the year. Although these early hand-held calculators were very costly, these advances in electronics, together with developments in display technology (such as the vacuum fluorescent display, LED, and LCD), led within a few years to the cheap pocket calculator available to all.

In 1971 Pico Electronics. and General Instrument also introduced their first collaboration in ICs, a full single chip calculator IC for the Monroe Royal Digital III calculator. Pico was a spinout by five GI design engineers whose vision was to create single chip calculator ICs. Pico and GI went on to have significant success in the burgeoning handheld calculator market.

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 Mostek MK6010, and the first electronic calculator to run off replaceable batteries. Using four AA-size cells the LE-120A measures 4.9 by 2.8 by 0.9 inches (124 mm × 71 mm × 23 mm).

The first European-made pocket-sized calculator, DB 800[31][32] is made in May 1971 by Digitron in Buje, Croatia (former Yugoslavia) with four functions and an eight-digit display and special characters for a negative number and a warning that the calculation has too many digits to display.

The first American-made pocket-sized calculator, the Bowmar 901B (popularly termed The Bowmar Brain), measuring 5.2 by 3.0 by 1.5 inches (132 mm × 76 mm × 38 mm), came out in the Autumn of 1971, with four functions and an eight-digit red LED display, for $240, while in August 1972 the four-function Sinclair Executive became the first slimline pocket calculator measuring 5.4 by 2.2 by 0.35 inches (137.2 mm × 55.9 mm × 8.9 mm) and weighing 2.5 ounces (71 g). It retailed for around £79 ($120.69). By the end of the decade, similar calculators were priced less than £5 ($7.64).

The first Soviet Union made pocket-sized calculator, the Elektronika B3-04 was developed by the end of 1973 and sold at the start of 1974.

One of the first low-cost calculators was the Sinclair Cambridge, launched in August 1973. It retailed for £29.95 ($45.76), or £5 ($7.64) less in kit form. The Sinclair calculators were successful because they were far cheaper than the competition; however, their design led to slow and inaccurate computations of transcendental functions.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard (HP) had been developing a pocket calculator. Launched in early 1972, it was unlike the other basic four-function pocket calculators then available in that it was the first pocket calculator with scientific functions that could replace a slide rule. The $395 HP-35, along with nearly 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 "+"; instead of the algebraic infix notation: "8", "+", "5", "=". It had 35 buttons and was based on Mostek Mk6020 chip.

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 using scientific notation for $150. Shortly after the SR-11 featured an added key for entering Pi (π). 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.

In 1978 a new company, Calculated Industries arose which focused on specialized markets. Their first calculator, the Loan Arranger(1978) was a pocket calculator marketed to the Real Estate industry with preprogrammed functions to simplify the process of calculating payments and future values. In 1985, CI launched a calculator for the construction industry called the Construction Master which came preprogrammed with common construction calculations (such as angles, stairs, roofing math, pitch, rise, run, and feet-inch fraction conversions). This would be the first in a line of construction related calculators.

Adler 81S pocket calculator with vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) from the mid-1970s.

The Casio CM-602 Mini electronic calculator provided basic functions in the 1970s.

The 1972 Sinclair Executive pocket calculator.

The HP-35, the world's first scientific pocket calculator by Hewlett Packard (1972).