Excellent story and calculator round up at the Electronics Design blog…
I suspect I was part of the first generation to have been brought up with “pocket” calculators (“pocket” to distinguish them from desktop mechanical calculators the size of a bread bin). I vaguely remember seeing them in my dad’s electronics magazines, sometime around 1979. One Christmas around then, my dad was bought one which has a fluorescent blue/green display which really looked super high-tech, and is still a really pleasing design. Although it was only a classic four-function machine (add, subtract, multiply, divide) I really coveted it, but it was couple of years before I got my own calc.
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