Until the 1970s, most calculating devices were constrained by either the limited number of tasks that they could perform or by their extravagant size and cost. Advances in integrated circuit research would prove to be the solution to both these problems, enabling the manufacture of miniaturised electronic calculators that were both flexible computing machines and, within a relatively short period of time, affordable to most.
The Whipple Museum is in possession of over 400 pocket electronic calculators, a collection assembled by Cambridge architect, Francis Hookham. You can download a fully illustrated catalogue of the Museum’s ‘Hookham Collection’ using this link:
Download Multiply: The Francis Hookham Collection of Hand Held Electronic Calculators (pdf)
Making microchips
In 1968, Hewlett-Packard (HP) released its HP 9100A, the first fully electronic desktop calculator: a limited yet powerful computer for its time. About the size of a typewriter and costing a whopping $4,900, it found its way into the pages of tech visionary Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, advertised next to beads and moccasins as the 'machine of the future'. Bill Hewlett congratulated his calculator design team on their achievement, but immediately set them to work on a model that was affordable and could fit in a shirt pocket.
At the same time, Texas Instruments (TI) and Sharp Electronics had also jumped into the race to make a miniaturised calculator using only four or five 'integrated circuits'. These 'microchips' (as they are now known) are small plates of semiconductor material composed of transistors and other tiny components which replaced discrete circuits made of large vacuum tubes and resistors.
A new electrical engineering company, Intel, was commissioned to make a 'microchip' for calculators manufactured by another Japanese company, Busicom. Intel bought back the rights to this chip in 1971 and began selling the Intel 4004, the world's first commercially available microprocessor, which launched a great number of developments in microelectronics that quickly swept through the computing industry.
