Anyone need a new Calculater ?

[KenBurris]

That is; if you don't need more than four functions

http://www.archive.org/details/sharp_calculator_2

[billwmeyer]

When I was in college the first time, around 68 or 69, I went to a required lecture given by a guy from Texas Instruments. He told us they were coming out with a product that would add, subtract multiply and divide and fit in your shirt pocket. I took a wait and see attitude, as I had just bought a 10 key calculator from Sears, that added and subtracted only and paid $100.00 for it. That was a lot of money to me and a lot of money in the late sixties. A calculator that would multiply and divide in those days was about the size of a typewriter (remember those?) and had a carriage that moved back and forth when calculating. I used a slide rule for classes.

It is hard to believe in my lifetime we went from sliderules to lap tops.

Bill

[stormdog74]

I remember taking trigonometry and our teacher saying that calculators were just a passing fad.

[Uncle Cracker]

I remember my first calc... It was a Royal 4-function, was about the size of a VHS tape, had a recharger unit as big as a shoe, and cost $200. And to top it off, most of my college prof's wouldn't allow it in their classrooms. I could not throw out my slide rule until a year or so later...

[gjat]

I'm a bit younger than ya'll. I just missed the slide rule, but calculators were still expensive. It's amazing that the Sharp calculator was $345 "complete" then, and we can buy a brand-new cheap laptop for that now.

[cabinetman]

I have that calculator and bought it new in the early 70's for somewhere around $300. I still have it and it runs fine with the AC adapter. Haven't tried to find a battery. Maybe it's valuable to a collector. It looks fairly small looking down on it but the back of it is tapered to about 2" high.
.

[Kristofor]

Uh, I've seen a slide rule...

We had to use the sin/cos/tan tables in the back of the book for one assignment in school to "learn how it used to be done" then we were able to use a calculator instead. They did limit the use of the higher end graphing calculators still (late 80's / early 90's). When my brother went through 8 years later, a graphing TI was required (no HP stack programing love?).

[pelligrini]

I saw my first digital calculator in 74 or 75. A kid in my 3rd grade class brought one in. His dad worked at TI. I had a SHARP programable scientific my Junior and Senior years.

A surveyor I used to work for told me about an adding machine the firm he worked for had. It was about 3' cube and you looked down into it to see the readout in nixie tubes.

[smorris]

I remember doing long hand math and graduating to a slide rule then a basic 4 function calculator. Recently I took a celestial navigation test and the instructor failed an answer because I worked out the whole equation instead of just pushing buttons. He said he couldn't understand what I was doing even though the answer was right. We'll just hope he never gets his calculator wet in a storm.

My boys were not amused with me when one day they were doing math homework in senior high and I asked them if the could do the work without a calculator. When they said no I pointed out that if that was the case then they hadn't learned math, only button pushing.

[tseavoy]

My first electronic calculator was a National Semiconductor integer calculator (no decimal point), so you had to sort of scale your numbers so that they were all integers. Then I got an HP25 for a subsidized price of $125. Before that I used company supplied Friden (mechanical), Marchant (mechanical), then Wang calculators that were the size of a desktop computer. The civil engineers taking surveying had to use a big book of 12 place natural logarithms to calculate all all their solutions to the trigonometry of the grids.
When desktop computers came out, only the managers got them and they sat on their desks as a power symbol, as they hadn't the foggiest.
Many of the new engineering graduates who grew up in the computer age were more or less computer program runners, as they didn't seem to have an understanding of the basic physics of the problem they were working on.
Crunching the numbers is the last step in solving a problem and shouldn't be thought of as the solution.

Tom on Marrowstone

My son sold your honor student the answers

[L. D. Jeffries]

I still have my E6B and use it pretty frequently just to keep my hand in. All you airplane drivers will know what I am taking about.

[Tom Slick]

My "old" TI-86 does graphing, trig and calc functions, regressions, builds tables... and it's 10 years old.
Engineering majors still use HP calculators, non-engineers use TI.

[Uncle Cracker]

All you airplane drivers will know what I am taking about.

I used to...

[BobSch]

I remember seeing an article in the fall of '71 that 4-function calculators would drop below $100 for Christmas that year. Now you can get a graphing calc that does it all for that price.