“The Man with a Micro-calculator” Digital Modernity & Late Soviet Computing

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An excerpt from the Springer series History of Computing, Exploring the Early Digital, chapter 10. “The Man with a Micro-calculator” Digital Modernity & Late Soviet Computing, Ksenia Tatarchenko, ISBN 978-3-030-02152-8 (eBook), © 2019, pages 179-200

   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. pg.183

  This excerpt and other paragraphs from this chapter are quite edifying!

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