A new book about the history of the pocket calculator

[bxparks]

I received this book as a gift recently and just finished reading it. It's a good read, the writing flows well, and it tells many interesting historical stories. It seems to be well-researched, with 78 pages of end-notes, which support 280 pages of content.

I think the strongest parts of the book are the early sections, which cover the calculating devices and the human attempts at computation before the invention of electronic pocket calculators. For example, this is the first time I am reading about departments composed of human "computers", mostly women: "Harvard College Observatory [...] hired its first female computer in 1875, and by 1880, the entire computing staff was made up of women. But this was not quite the victory for equality that it appeared to be. Harvard's female computers were paid only half the wages of their male predecessors." I guess this became common enough between WWI and WWII that in 1944, "a member of the U.S. National Department Research Committee [referred] to a unit of computing power as a kilo-girl."

For me, the weakest part of book is the coverage of the later years, in other words, the rise and fall of the *electronic* pocket calculator. The book covers the first graphing calculator from Texas Instruments (TI-81) in Chapter 14. Then VisiCalc kills the calculator in Chapter 15. And that's the end of the book. There is no coverage of modern graphing calculators with CAS systems, for example, and how that affects the teaching of mathematics to students. No mention of how different calculator companies took over different parts of the world. No coverage of the collapse of HP's calculator division. (Addendum: No mention of the most important debate in the 50-year history of scientific calculators: RPN or AOS. :-))

Anyway, that's my quick book report: good read, great historical information, but weak coverage of modern electronic calculators.