“Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator” by Keith Houston

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Rating: 5/5 Stars

A fascinating book on the history of counting and the rise (and fall) of the pocket calculator. The author starts with a history of humans counting and remembering counted values using various parts of their body. This leads to various ways, like notches on sticks or imprints on materials, as a way to record values. The need to quickly add, subtract and record values leads to arithmetic aids like the abacus and other simple mechanical aids.

The need to quickly perform multiplications (and other operations like division, square roots, etc.) would lead to mathematical innovations. One of them would involve the creation of logarithms, which convert multiplications (and the other operations) into ‘simple’ additions and subtractions. Various tables would be created before, once again, machines would be created as aids, like the slide rule. Other calculating machines would become more sophisticated, finally culminating in the mechanical wonder, the Curta, a handheld mechanical calculator.

The rise of electricity and electronics would lead to mechanical relay calculators, then calculators based on vacuum tubes and then, individual transistors and those with integrated circuits. The race to cram more transistors and mathematical operations into cheaper, and smaller, packagers would culminate in the rise of the pocket calculator. The pocket calculator race would lead to various wonders, like the scientific calculator, the programmer calculator, graphing calculators. Strange variations would also appear, like watches with calculators.

The book closes with the final ‘act’ when computers would ‘swallow’ the calculator by implementing it in software like Visicalc (one of the first spreadsheet software), leading to the world we know today, where we calculate using software and actual calculators now live on a neglected life in our drawers.

Book read from 2023/09/24 to 2023/10/02