There are also photographs of many other hand-held electronic calculators in the Hand-held Calculator Photo Library on this site.įor information about the electronics inside the calculators see the Calculator Technology section.Ĭlick on a picture below for more details and more, bigger pictures. Frequently models were named "Electronic Slide Rules", illustrating that the device was seenĪs a replacement for the mechanical slide-rule.įeatured here are significant hand-held calculators and a selection of typical models. The early designs of hand-held calculators were very varied, and some now appear to be quite exotic. These devices continued to sell into the mid-1970s when the cost of hand-held electronic calculators fell so that they became affordable by all. The alternative to the early, expensive, hand-held electronic calculators was the slide rule, including the Otis-King cylindrical type, and the miniature mechanical calculator such as the Curta, see the bottom of this page.
Produced only one or two models (see the "One Hit Wonders" page), whereas a handful of companies survived the plunge in calculator prices of the mid-1970s and continue to produce calculators today.
So, over the next few years several thousand models were produced by two to three hundred companies. Making a profit and started to produce electronic hand-held calculators. Initially the high cost of the leading edge electronics used in the early hand-held calculators meant that the price of these calculators was also very high. The world was astounded when the first pocket electronic calculators became available in the shops and enabled anyone who could afford one toĬarry a means to instant answers to their mathematical needs. However, technology was developing very rapidly and there followed in late 1970/early 1971 much more pocketable models from Canon, Sanyo, and Sharp, and the first truly pocket calculator, the Busicom LE-120A.
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING CALCULATOR SELF MADE PORTABLE
in mid-1970, and around the same time Sanyo brought out the ICC-0081 (in the Portable Electronic Calculator Section) and ICC-82D, with Canon introducing the Pocketronic.Īll of these models, which are featured here, can be used hand-held and remote from AC power, but are much too large to be called pocket calculators. Thus Sharp produced the QT8-B, which was advertised in the U.S.A. Then by replacing the AC power section with rechargeable batteries the first hand-held calculators were produced. The fascinating story of the development of miniature electronics for calculators and the competing companies involved is told in the section "The Race to Make a Pocket Calculator" on this site.īy 1969 several companies had produced AC-powered calculators employing just a handful of integrated circuits which had a low power requirement, such as Sharp of Japan with the QT8-D desktop calculator. So electronic calculators became smaller and also their power consumption So electronic calculators were then very large, consumed a lot of power, and only AC-powered desktop models were available.Īs integrated circuits were developed it was possible to squeeze more and more functionality into fewer and fewer chips. Featured Electronic Hand-held Calculators:Ī study of the Featured Desktop Electronic Calculators section shows that through the 1960s large numbers of electronics components were required in a calculator.
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