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krpalmerWith extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
Houston starts off with counting on fingers (and mentions a few ways of doing that which can go much higher than “ten”), drops in on the abacus and the slide rule, and describes mechanical calculators (and, in mentioning how they were used to work through complicated equations broken down into many simple calculations, references a book I’ve read called When Computers Were Human.) Electricity enters the tale as components move from electromechanical relays to vacuum tubes to transistors and integrated circuits, and the book does come to have each chapter focus on a particular machine.
What I did get to thinking, though, was that the book didn’t offer as much detail as I would have liked about what I understand to be the go-go years of the electronic pocket calculator in the early 1970s when even simple add-subtract-multiply-divide models (I’ve seen them called “four-bangers”) were something households were buying for the first time. Houston did go back and mention both the controversy about whether calculators should be allowed in schools and how dedicated books about calculators sort of faded away, but I still could have done with more information, while realising this might have needed more original research in old magazines or even newspapers.
In any case, the book did end by describing the calculator as “subliming,” ending up an application on computer and smart phone screens even if there was a chapter about the new calculation paradigm of VisiCalc. There was a chapter on how Intel designed its first microprocessor for a Japanese desk calculator, but we didn’t get the anecdote how Ed Roberts at MITS pivoted to the Altair microcomputer after his small company was squeezed out of the calculator market by bigger companies. (For that matter, we didn’t get the perhaps dodgier anecdote I’ve seen provided by a Commodore partisan that VisiCalc only became the “killer app” for the Apple II because the Commodore PET also at Personal Software was in much heavier use at the time. Thinking of that at least reminded me my family has both a simple Radio Shack calculator and a Commodore scientific calculator of 1970s vintage in a drawer. I’m not certain if either of them would still work even with battery chargers, but I do have my mother’s high school slide rule as well; it still works the way it once did.)
Houston starts off with counting on fingers (and mentions a few ways of doing that which can go much higher than “ten”), drops in on the abacus and the slide rule, and describes mechanical calculators (and, in mentioning how they were used to work through complicated equations broken down into many simple calculations, references a book I’ve read called When Computers Were Human.) Electricity enters the tale as components move from electromechanical relays to vacuum tubes to transistors and integrated circuits, and the book does come to have each chapter focus on a particular machine.
What I did get to thinking, though, was that the book didn’t offer as much detail as I would have liked about what I understand to be the go-go years of the electronic pocket calculator in the early 1970s when even simple add-subtract-multiply-divide models (I’ve seen them called “four-bangers”) were something households were buying for the first time. Houston did go back and mention both the controversy about whether calculators should be allowed in schools and how dedicated books about calculators sort of faded away, but I still could have done with more information, while realising this might have needed more original research in old magazines or even newspapers.
In any case, the book did end by describing the calculator as “subliming,” ending up an application on computer and smart phone screens even if there was a chapter about the new calculation paradigm of VisiCalc. There was a chapter on how Intel designed its first microprocessor for a Japanese desk calculator, but we didn’t get the anecdote how Ed Roberts at MITS pivoted to the Altair microcomputer after his small company was squeezed out of the calculator market by bigger companies. (For that matter, we didn’t get the perhaps dodgier anecdote I’ve seen provided by a Commodore partisan that VisiCalc only became the “killer app” for the Apple II because the Commodore PET also at Personal Software was in much heavier use at the time. Thinking of that at least reminded me my family has both a simple Radio Shack calculator and a Commodore scientific calculator of 1970s vintage in a drawer. I’m not certain if either of them would still work even with battery chargers, but I do have my mother’s high school slide rule as well; it still works the way it once did.)