Why do even the simplest calculators feature a square root key?

[pier4r]

(05-06-2018 09:07 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  I believe it's included on such low-end machines simply to make them appear more sophisticated (and therefore justifiably more expensive) than the nominal 4-banger. Also, it takes very minimal efforts to test and document this function.

This is actually a very good hypothesis. As even the late mechanical 4 function calculators started to implement the square root function. (And there one can also see that the work done is a lot)