In this day and age of tablets that have screens with over three million pixels, it’s easy to forget the humble pocket calculator, one of the world’s first examples of mobile computing. The New York Times remembers, though, and has published a nice look back at one of the major victims of digitalization. Most amusing among the stories told in this piece is probably the one about the Soviet diplomat whose Sinclair Executive calculator exploded in his shirt pocket after the batteries overheated — back then, you could only leave your calculator on for a few hours at a time. Due to the “tense political climate,” the Soviets supposedly established an official investigation into this incident to make sure there was no foul play afoot. While it’s easy to laugh at the popularity of pocket calculators now, they were a pretty big deal back when computers were both all the rage and not accessible to the public.
An ode to the pocket calculator, one of the first mobile computing devices
In this day and age of tablets that have screens with over three million pixels, it’s easy to forget the humble pocket calculator, one of the world’s first examples of mobile computing. The New York Times remembers, though, and has published a nice look back at one of the major victims of digitalization.
In this day and age of tablets that have screens with over three million pixels, it’s easy to forget the humble pocket calculator, one of the world’s first examples of mobile computing. The New York Times remembers, though, and has published a nice look back at one of the major victims of digitalization.
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