A new book about the history of the pocket calculator
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06-09-2024, 11:26 PM
Post: #17
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RE: A new book about the history of the pocket calculator
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. BEST! SlideRule |
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