When I started work in 1965, our branch had just bought a Wang calculator system for $10,000. It was as big as a small filing cabinet. It had 16 stations but only four could be used at one time. It could only add,subtract, multiply, divide and do square roots. We thought we were in heaven because of the square root function. We did a lot of light calculations that required us to find square roots of numbers to many decimal places on data for every second of a three minute event. We did this for hundreds of events.
In 1970, a professor from a small college who worked summers in our branch brought his personal TI-?? calculator to work. It cost him $500. It was unbelievable to us because it did so many functions; logs, trig functions, square roots etc. We ended up buying several for our branch and shared them.
Things sure have changed.
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Frenchy
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