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unusual facts about calculator



0.999...

Joseph Mazur tells the tale of an otherwise brilliant calculus student of his who "challenged almost everything I said in class but never questioned his calculator," and who had come to believe that nine digits are all one needs to do mathematics, including calculating the square root of 23.

36-bit

Prior to the introduction of computers, the state of the art in precision scientific and engineering calculation was the ten-digit, electrically powered, mechanical calculator, such as those manufactured by Friden, Marchant and Monroe.

Airnav.com

Additionally available on Airnav.com is METAR, terminal aerodrome forecast (TAF), distance calculator, times of morning and evening civil twilight and sunset/sunrise to aid the pilot for decision-making purposes and to be legally equipped for night flight, airport management remarks, Notice to Airmen (NOTAM), distances to popular landmarks and attractions, hotels, cities, and closest airports.

BESK

Reportedly this was an intentional and unnoticed pun after officials denied usage of the name CONIAC (Conny Palm Integrator And Calculator, compare Cognac and ENIAC) for the predecessor BARK.

Binary number

In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on 11 September 1940, Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator remote commands over telephone lines by a teletype.

College cost calculator

College cost calculator, in the United States, is an online tool allowing students and their parents to calculate how much college is likely to cost.

Error function

Google search: Google's search also acts as a calculator and will evaluate "erf(...)" and "erfc(...)" for real arguments.

Graphing Calculator

NuCalc, a computer software program able to perform many graphing calculator functions

HP Continuous memory

The term continuous memory was coined by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to describe a unique feature of certain HP calculators whereby the calculator could internally sustain most, or in later models - all, of the contents of user memory (via battery-backed CMOS memory).

HP-25

The model HP-25C, introduced in 1976, addressed that shortcoming through the first use of battery-backed CMOS memory in a calculator, termed continuous memory by HP.

HP-35

The HP-41C was a major advance in programmability and capacity, and offered CMOS memory so that programs were not lost when the calculator was switched off.

IBM NORC

The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) was a one-of-a-kind first-generation (vacuum tube) computer built by IBM for the United States Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.

Inverse Symbolic Calculator

The Inverse Symbolic Calculator is an online number checker established July 18, 1995 by Peter Benjamin Borwein, Jonathan Michael Borwein and Simon Plouffe of the Canadian Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (Burnaby, Canada).

Investing.com

The site also offers users tools such as a currency converter, heat-maps, and various calculators (Fibonacci calculator, currency calculator, profit calculator, margin calculator, Forex volatility).

IP Pascal

IP Pascal implements the language "Pascaline" (named after Blaise Pascal's calculator), which is a highly extended superset of ISO 7185 Pascal.

Ivrea

During the 20th century its primary claim to fame was as the base of operations for Olivetti, a manufacturer of typewriters, mechanical calculators and, later, computers.

James W. Bryce

In 1937 Bryce was approached by Howard Aiken of Harvard University, who persuaded IBM to fund a programmable calculator which became the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as the Harvard Mark I.

Masatoshi Shima

With poor prospects for employment in the field of chemistry, he went to work for Busicom, a business calculator manufacturer.

MikroSim

With this e-learning tool, devices like miniaturized calculators, microcontroller, microprocessors, and computer can be explained didactically on own-developed instruction code on register transfer level, which are controlled by program sequences of micro instructions (microcode).

Minichess

In 1980 HP shipped HP-41C programmable calculator, which could play this game.

Multiplication

Beginning in the early twentieth century, mechanical calculators, such as the Marchant, automated multiplication of up to 10 digit numbers.

NuCalc

This version of Graphing Calculator was secretly developed at Apple by Ron Avitzur, an abandoned contractor who felt obligated to complete the project, and his friend and colleague Greg Robbins.

Ramón Verea

Ramón Silvestre Verea Aguiar y García (Curantes, 1833 – Buenos Aires, 1899) was a Spanish journalist, engineer and writer, known as the inventor of a calculator with an internal multiplication table.

Richard Swineshead

Robert Burton (d. 1640) wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy that "Scaliger and Cardan admire Suisset the calculator, qui pene modum excessit humani ingenii whose talents were almost superhuman".

Scientific calculator

The HP-9100 series was built entirely from discrete transistor logic with no integrated circuits, and was one of the first uses of the CORDIC algorithm for trigonometric computation in a personal computing device, as well as the first calculator based on Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) entry.

Sinclair Scientific

Clive Sinclair wanted to design a calculator to compete with the HP-35 using the 080x series of chips, and despite skepticism about the feasibility of the project from Texas Instruments engineers, Nigel Searle was able to design algorithms that sacrificed some speed and accuracy in order to implement scientific functions.

Stanley Mazor

The Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom asked Intel to complete the design and manufacture of a new set of chips.

Technology readiness level

A Technology Readiness Level Calculator was developed by the United States Air Force.

TI-89 series

In the United States, the TI-89 is allowed by the College Board on all calculator-permitted tests, including the SAT, some SAT Subject Tests, and the AP Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and Statistics exams.

Tracy W. Bush

He has recently performed voice acting for the characters Calculator, Ambush Bug, Booster Gold and Deathstroke in DC Universe Online.

Weighted Airman Promotion System

The WAPS Promotion Score Calculator is used by enlisted airmen to estimate the minimum test score for promotion to the next enlisted rank.


see also