The Can(n)on that fizzled

[Duane Hess]

Hi Matt:

I took your question with somewhat of a different "age". Maybe because the 1st calculator I bought was a Canon back in '74(?) when I was in Jr. High. I was in a small/moderate sized town in "ruralish" area of Nebraska. We had 3 office stores and I only recall Canon, Sharp and Olympia being sold. Any other brand was mail order. Once TI started their education push many school math teachers accumulated orders from students directly, else even TI would be a "back of the magazine" purchase.

As we all know the calculator business back then was a very cut-throat affair due to widely varing manufacturing, development, research and sales costs depending on the specific vendor. Along with the non-ending technical evolution affecting all those issues.

In the opinion of a primarily technology isolated early teenager who occasionally talked to the sales people in those 3 office equipment stores and from things I've read in the last 40 years (very infrequently), I'd summarize Canon's involvement in calculators as follows:

Back in the day Canon had calculators with widely varing abilities; most of which were "costly". Even though they had scientific units they sold them with a "old business" mentality. I suspect Canon realized calculators were a dog-eat-dog technology, so tried a "niche" approach. The niche was to try a sell to their tried-and-true long term business customer base. Shortly into the mid/latter 70's they realized the technology was too blood thirsty. Meaning even loyal customer bases would look elsewhere for less expensive and more flexible products, hence pulled the plug. Afterwards Canon's involvement in calculators was mainly "commodity".

Like-wise with their foray into desktop microcomputers.

This is strictly the personal opinion of a naive 14 year old who never even heard of Texas Instruments. That, in itself, should give you an idea of how technically isolated many were in mid-Nebraska. So take it as is.