A new book about the history of the pocket calculator

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An excerpt from Exploring the Early Digital, History of Computing series, © Springer 2019, ISBN 978-3-030-02152-8 (eBook), 2`13 pages

Chapter 10
“The Man with a Micro-calculator”:
Digital Modernity and Late Soviet
Computing Practices
…
   Half a century later, the man was still celebrating Soviet technological modernity,
but this time he was wielding a programmable calculator. When the nation’s
most prominent popular scientific magazine, Nauka i Zhizn' [Science and Life],
started a column devoted to both playful and serious applications of programmable
calculators, the column was titled “The Man with a Micro-calculator.”
…
   As most recent historical narratives increasingly describe the computerization
using the term of “digital revolution,” the exclusion of calculators, a literally
and obviously digital technology, is a paradox revealing underlying
presuppositions. The user communities around programmable calculators have
been systematically omitted in academic historiography. The most conspicuous
exception to this is Paul Ceruzzi’s standard A History of Modern Computing
(1998), which prominently features programmable calculators and their user
groups and newsletters as the vehicle through which ordinary professionals and
technological enthusiasts were first exposed to programmable digital technologies.
Yet even Ceruzzi deploys these machines within his master narrative primarily
as a way of explaining why users were ready to embrace personal computers.
…
   I start by showing important parallels between the Soviet and American trajectories
of calculators as commodities by tracing the contours of the Soviet microelectronics
industry responsible for the mass production of calculators. Next, I turn to
the pages of Nauka i Zhizn’ to trace the meaning of “hands-on” work within the
Soviet material culture as well as the organization of the calculator user communities
and the exploitation of the machines’ “undocumented” features. In the second
half of the chapter, I explore the domestication of programmable calculators in the
broader Soviet context of the state computerization campaign.
…
10.1 The Making of a Commodity
…
                                        … The calculators were the devices that both showed
what IC could do and the economy of scale governing their production. During the
1970s, many actors stepped in the new niche of producing calculators, and the
prices were brought down drastically. As the simplest calculators became giveaway
commodities, the high-end (and more profitable) programmable calculators, with
performance characteristics rivaling that of a computer, were developed. Targeted at
engineers and scientists, these calculators publicized the idea of portable and personal
computing before the advent of the “personal computer.”
…
   The mass production of Soviet pocket calculators started in the mid-1970s and
the programmable ones at the end of the decade, only a few years behind the Western
and Japanese benchmarks. A 1990 (Trokhimenko) publication devoted to technical
characteristics of several Soviet programmable calculators contains tables listing
the main features of some prominent Soviet models, a number of Hewlett-Packard
(HP) models, and those of Texas Instruments. The comparison with the HP models
is particularly insightful, as the Soviet developers clearly appreciated and utilized
the advantages of the reverse Polish notation used by HP. In Table 10.1, I reproduce
the information about the Soviet and HP devices complimented with additional data
regarding dates of production runs and retail prices upon the first release.

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