jan 1, 1963 - Electronic Calculator

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Jerry Merryman, one of three people at Texas Instruments credited with inventing the world’s first handheld electronic calculator in the 1960s. The prototype could do four basic functions: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. And while the calculator is incredibly primitive to those of us in the 21st century, it revolutionized the world of electronics. The term “calculator” hadn’t caught on yet, so the first generic name for the thing internally at TI was a “slide rule computer.” A commercial version of the calculator, branded as the Pocketronic, went on sale in 1970. The purpose of the calculator is to perform arithmetic operations on numbers. The simplest calculators can only do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. More sophisticated calculators can handle exponential operations, roots, logarithms, trigonometric functions, and hyperbolic functions. It is important for society and computing purposes because it helps become more efficient and helps with efficiency purposes as well.

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