Conservación de Humalog Mix50

Analog calculators, especially the slide rule, had dominated complex calculations since the early seventeenth century. In the years after ENIAC, large desktop alternatives became steadily available, but these electro-mechanical business calculators were unable to handle the size, complexity, or number of operations required by scientists, archi-tects, and engineers. While PDPs and their successors made inroads into these communities, minicomputers were still prohibitively ex-pensive for private or small-shop use. For this reason, complex calcu-lations at the drawing board or in the lab were still being performed on a device that had been invented by William Oughtred in about 1625.¹⁸

The slide rule (or slipstick, as it was often called) had serious limita-tions. When John Atanasoff observed his students’ frustrations in us-ing slide rules to solve what he called “large systems of simultaneous algebraic equations for . . . partial differential,” he began to contem-plate a digital computer in 1935.¹⁹In order to distinguish between the capabilities and methods of the slide rule and those of the electronic computer he dreamed of building, Atanasoff began to refer to them re-spectively as analog and digital devices. By 1940 he and his graduate assistant, Charles Berry, had built a prototype digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). John Mauchly would plagiarize Atanasoff’s ideas in order to create his own large-capacity electronic calculator to handle weather data (see Chapter 5).

Despite its limitations, the slide rule had the advantage of being compact and readily available. By the early 1960s, large computers could satisfy most complex needs, but many people who needed such computing power still had very limited access. Elaine A. Gifford of the

National Photographic Interpretation Center worked as a photo-gram-metrist interpreting data in the top secret CORONA spy-satellite pro-gram. Despite their limitless funding, almost no one had adequate ac-cess to computer time. She remembers, “We didn’t have hand-held calculators in 1965; during that period we had to look up trigonometry functions and use slide rules . . . The ground resources lagged behind the overhead satellite system.” A few years later, an article in the Elec-tronic Engineer entitled “An ElecElec-tronic Digital Slide Rule” predicted that if it became possible to build a hand-held calculator, “the conventional slide-rule will become a museum piece.”²⁰

One solution to the increasing demand for calculating power and the simultaneous inaccessibility of computer time was to make desktop calculators more powerful and fl xible. At Cal Tech a small programmable calculator went into the planning stages as early as 1966. In 1968, in Japan, Masatoshi Shima, an engineer at ETI, parent company of the calculator fi m Busicom, had the idea of designing a programmable desktop calculator using integrated circuits containing 3,000 transistors, at a time when the most sophisticated calculators used only 1,000. In 1969 ETI approached Intel with their design.

Noyce and Moore assigned Ted Hoff, the company’s twelfth and new-est employee, to assist the Japanese in making a suitable set of com-ponents. Until that time, Hoff’s main job at the company had been to fin new uses for Intel memory chips.²¹

From the beginning, Hoff thought that ETI’s complex design would prove too much for Intel’s limited manpower.He also knew that a single memory chip was suffici ntly large to store the program Busicom needed. Although Busicom had no need for a general-pur-pose computer, Hoff suggested that they could reduce their amount of logic (and the number of transistors) simply by using a memory chip to run calculator subroutines. At first Shima and ETI’s other engineers reacted negatively, but Hoff persisted. He next suggested that they put the central processing unit (CPU) of a simple computer onto a single

chip and run it from stored programs on a few more Intel memory chips. Theoretically, this was possible, given the large-scale integra-tion (LSI) of circuits on a single chip that had already been achieved throughout the semiconductor industry. A microchip’s capacity for in-tegrated circuits had kept pace with Moore’s Law, doubling each year since 1965.

The American’s argument was compelling, and it soon convinced Shima, a skilled engineer who was intrigued by Hoff’s ideas. When Noyce,the business genius of Intel,learned that Busicom was experien-cing financia difficul y, he offered them Intel’s 4004 chip at a greatly reduced price, provided Intel retained worldwide rights to the Busicom chip.ETI agreed. This single deal would make Intel one of the most powerful computer companies in the world, while its Japanese partner would later be forced into bankruptcy shortly before Masatoshi Shima came to work for Intel.²²

Hoff’s microprocessor, the 4004 chip, relied on three other chips—two containing memory and another controlling input and out-put functions. Frederico Faggin, who did not share in the micropro-cessor’s patent and soon left Intel to work at Atari, designed its com-plex circuitry. Busicom’s printing desktop calculator, the 141-PF, was introduced to the Japanese market in April 1970. That same month, Canon and Texas Instruments introduced their Pocketronic program-mable calculator to the Japanese market with circuits designed by TI’s Gary Boone under the direction of Jack Kilby.Despite its name,the Pocketronic was actually a hand-held calculator weighing 2.5 pounds.

Like its 1966 Cal Tech prototype (now on display at the Smithsonian), it was too big to fi in an ordinary pocket. In 1996 the U.S. Patent Offi e officia ly recognized Boone’s “microcontroller.” Although Hoff’s 4004 Intel microprocessor had been invented earlier, Boone’s was the firs to combine input and output functions on a single chip.²³Boone’s TMX 1795 existed only in prototype. TI took its successor, the TMS01XX, to the production stage.

In 1971 just months after Canon and Texas Instruments introduced the Pocketronic in America, another Texas fi m, Bowmar, unveiled the four-function 901B calculator, the firs truly pocketsized calculator.The Bowmar Brain,as it was known, was not very powerful, but it was entirely American-made and was also probably the firs consumer device to use a light-emitting diode display, although LED alarm clocks and digital watches would not be far behind.²⁴Bowmar simul-taneously manufactured a second calculator, the C110, under contract to Commodore.

The next few years saw an avalanche of increasingly powerful, soph-isticated, and cheap pocket calculators. Commodore introduced suc-cessive models, the Minuteman 1 and 2, between January and August of 1972. Intel released its 8-bit processor in April of the same year. By July, Hewlett Packard was using the new Intel chip in its firs scientifi calculator, the HP-35, which retailed for $395. With its capacity to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions faster and more ac-curately than a slide rule or any other analog device, the HP-35 was a revolution for engineers and scientists.²⁵

That year also saw the debut of the Aristo M27, a four-function cal-culator like the Bowmar Brain that used TI chips. It was a good basic machine, but the most significan fact about the M-27 was that its man-ufacturer was Aristo, Denner and Pape, a company that had mainly produced slide rules since 1872.Clearly,they were adapting to a chan-ging marketplace. In 1973 TI brought out the firs “slide rule calculat-or,” the SR-50, which retailed for a mere $170. The next year initiated the calculator price wars. By January 1974 Aristo had introduced their own scientifi calculator, the M75, and by June Commodore had an en-tire line of calculators (the 700/800 series) for sale at around $25.

Finally, in 1975 Aristo, Denner and Pape shut down slide rule produc-tion forever. Their main competitor, Keuffel and Esser, also stopped making slide rules and began selling calculators manufactured by Texas Instruments, using Gary Boone’s TMS01XX chips.

Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering, recalled an ongoing de-bate among his faculty colleagues at the University of Texas in the early 1970s over whether students wealthy enough to possess a scienti-fi calculator had an unfair advantage over their poorer classmates in tests and quizzes.²⁶Following the price wars in 1974, this question be-came moot, and by 1976 a good calculator that had cost $395 in 1972 now cost less than $10. Calculator manufacturers were producing fif y million units a year, and competitive pricing had made them univer-sally affordable. SR calculators, too, were becoming ridiculously cheap. In his fina book, The Green Imperative, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous apprentice, Victor Papanek, shared this recollection from the 1970s: “One of my favorite photographs . . . showed more than 600 engineers’ slide rules stuck into the ground around a neighbor’s lawn, forming a tiny, sardonic, white picket fence. When I asked about it my neighbor’s wife said, ‘We bought these slide rules for one dollar a bar-rel . . . and used all six hundred.’”²⁷

Of more interest than the diminishing cost of calculators and the de-mise of the slide rule is the obsolescence of the skill set that older-gen-eration engineers possessed. Tom West and Carl Alsing recalled prom-ising each other not to “turn away candidates” at Data General in 1978

“just because the youngsters made them feel old and obsolete.” By the early 1980s it was hard to fin a recent graduate or engineering student who still used a slide rule for calculations. Older engineers, on the oth-er hand, woth-ere reluctant to part with them. A study by the Futures Group found that engineers in senior managerial positions universally kept their slide rules close by because they were more comfortable with analog devices.²⁸The digital accuracy and speed that younger en-gineers took for granted meant less to those who had received their training before the 1970s revolution in calculation. Even Jack Kilby,the man who invented the integrated circuit and supervised de-velopment of TI’s Pocketronic, preferred to use a slide rule. Sensitive to accusations of being dinosaurs, some old-school administrators

kept their slipsticks under cover in desk drawers or cabinets and per-formed calculations on these obsolete devices in private.

Thus, by the 1980s, what younger engineers perceived as a demo-cratization of calculation had in fact sheared the engineering world along generational lines. Age,not wealth, determined which engineers had the advantage. As the hacker culture would soon demonstrate, design and engineering were no longer the exclusive activities of a carefully trained elite. The term “obsolete” now applied both to the device that the older generation of administrators preferred and to the analog skills they used. By 1978 when James Martin wrote The Wired Society, nostalgic attachment to obsolete skills and devices had be-come a recognized phenomenon of the information age: “Old techno-logy always has a momentum that keeps it going long after it is obsol-ete. It is difficul for the establishment to accept a change in culture or procedure.”²⁹

Gradually, during the late 1970s, calculator technology slipped off the cutting edge. Unit costs for calculators shrank to insignifican e, and the brightest lights of the semiconductor fi ms moved on to newer challenges in and around Silicon Valley—at the Stanford Research In-stitute (SRI), Xerox-PARC, Apple Computers,and Atari.A quarter of a century later,when Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins left Palm to found Handspring, he described his decision as analogous to this shift in the calculator industry: “The organizer business is going to be like calculators. There is still a calculator business but who wants to be in it? They’re cheap, and sort of the backwater of consumer electron-ics.”³⁰Palm’s founder was contemptuous of calculators because they had become low-cost complimentary giveaways at the local credit uni-on. Their cheap construction and short battery life sent them quickly into America’s landfi ls, where they were unceremoniously buried—the firs generation of microchip e-waste.