Hi Everyone! This is my first mega and I thought I would start simple around something that I think is interesting and that is the history of the first handheld calculator as well as introduce Lynn Conway, a trans woman and electrical engineer that helped pioneer the modern CPU we have today. Lynn recently passed away but her personal website is still up:

Lynn’s personal website

I think I hit the limit or picture limit or something and it’s not letting me add more pictures so I’ll post what I have and will update with more stuff as more things come to mind. Thank you and have a great week.

Shortly after the invention of the transistor in the 1950’s companies like Sharp were looking to build the first transistorized calculator. This would be significant because at the time, Vacuum tubes were comparatively large and fragile. That changed in 1964 with the introduction of the first truly transistorized calculator such as the Sharp CS10.

Now at the time this predated the “Integrated Circuit”, aka the little black chip filled with transistors. Below is a picture showing the construction of this desktop size calculator, filled with boards with many components each. Not to mention the display for this was the Nixie tube, basically a little specialized neon tube.

Now something like the CS-10, or any portable calculator would require many hundreds of transistors, plus the passive components required meaning that with the technology in the 1960’s a handheld calculator was a futuristic concept. For context, the Apollo space program was one of the earliest projects to attempt to fully utilize this new IC technology, and even then each IC would only hold a few transistors per chip. Below is an image of one of these IC’s, a 3 input NOR gate.

This concept of increasing density of electronics is something called integration, with varying acronyms indicating some further refinement (LSI - Large scale integration, VLSI - Very large scale integration). Essentially what they were doing at the time was figuring out how to make transistors smaller and to squeeze more on per silicon die. You can imagine at the time this was cutting edge technology thus very expensive and companies were looking for ways on how to be able to justify this cost. By continuing to shrink the size of transistors, integrate more into a single chip and have that same chip also increase in functionality led the way.

By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s electronics were transitioning (not a pun I am just bad at writing) from discrete, individual transistors, to IC’s that had a few transistors each and composed of logic gates, to devices that had tens or hundreds of transistors on a single die. This integration soon led to “chipsets”, where the functionality could be accomplished by a handful of IC’s instead of hundreds of individual transistors.

A calculator company in Japan named Busicom wanted to build a new innovative calculator taking advantage of the new breakthroughs in this LSI (Large scale integration) technology and partnered with a company called Intel to create this new calculator. What they came up with was the implementation of one of the first true CPU’s, the Intel 4004. Although the 4004 would soon be surpassed by other devices, this “chipset” concept and reduction to a single circuit board was groundbreaking.

By this time in 1971-1972 the holy grail for the first truly portable handheld calculator was within reach. A chip (or small set of chips) that could contain all of the functions needed for a calculator that could run on a battery. During this era there were many, many handheld calculators but it can generally be agreed that the earliest breakthroughs came from Texas Instruments, HP, Sinclair and Casio and some others and the market was flooded with these calculators.

Within a few years the price of a handheld calculator would plummet from a few hundred, to around 100, to less than 100. Without the calculator it’s arguable that the development of the modern CPU would have been set back years or decades thanks to the major contributions that calculators had in pushing LSI technology forward.

Source: http://www.vintagecalculators.com/index.html

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