Core77

Exhibition: Vintage Calculator Designs, 1968 - 1983

"The first aspirational personal electronics"

By Rain Noe - August 15, 2023

in Object Culture

Product designer Greg Maletic collects vintage calculators. "I've had a fascination with these machines since the 70s," he writes, "when the calculators my dad would bring home from the office were the only computer-like things I could get my tiny hands on."

Next weekend in Portland, Oregon, Maletic is curating a pop-up exhibition of his collection.

"In the 1970s, calculators weren't just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics."

"Calculators 1968-1983 showcases these remarkable design objects, along with stories behind why they look and operate the way they do. And how, in just a few decades, one of the world's most important products went from indispensable to irrelevant."

"The exhibit highlights more than 100 calculators, all beautiful examples of late 20th Century design."

Details are here.

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Martin Rosenblum

a year ago

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What I would have given for a scientific calculator as an engineering undergrad in 1970! I just hated doing all the physics lab calculations on my slide rule. Sometimes I just turned in my reports with "-15 pts - no error analysis" written on them. Somehow, I made it all the way through and completed my Ph.D. in applied physics without a computer! We were stuck in the past and my x-ray diffraction data came out on teletype machine on a machine that may have been built sometime after WWII.
My older brother still has his HP-35 from its initial release. Where he got the money at the time is still a mystery. I'll have to ask. I've got my HP-15C from the '80s when I spent a few years at HP Labs.
Please excuse my ramblings. As a retired physicist, I don't really have any business on this web sight, but I just love to see all these designs and products. And yes, the HP designs are rather technocentric and inelegant.

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- Jason Scala
  
  Martin Rosenblum
  
  a year ago
  
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  Please, ramble on. I enjoyed reading this comment.
  
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Michael DiTullo

a year ago

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going to go try to check it out!

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