University Daily Kansan
Thursdav. November 15. 1979
7
Calculator popularity increases as price decreases
By SUSAN SCHOENMAKER
Staff Renorter
Shortcuts for the mathematically-minded and manna for the numerically inpt, calculators have jumped from novelty to necessity in the past decade.
The most simple calculator, which adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides, cost $49 seven years ago, according to an employee survey. Today, it costs $15. Today that calendar seller calls for $9.95.
It has paid to be a preprascient in the calculator market, according to Gerry Kelly, KU professor of electrical engineering.
"For the same dollar, the calculator's power has been doubling every year for the past 10 years," Kelly said.
Calculator power refers to the
calculator's speed and the number of functions it can perform.
"That is a really good track record," Kelly said.
According to Kelly, students wasted no time swapping slide rules for calculators.
"Students picked up really quickly on calculators," he said. "The transition period from the slide rule to the calculator was less than two years."
Low calculator prices encouraged student use and today those prices have hit bottom, according to calculator experts.
"Within the last two years the brakes have been put on the market," said John Peters, marketing representative for the company. The calculator company based in Corvallis, Ore.
He said the calculator industry had reached a point where fixed costs, such as
labor, prevented the price from dipping any lower, regardless of technological developments.
The ' introduction of a photographic
imprugment process 10 years ago was reduced the
number of printed formations,
and paved the way to increasingly complicated calculator func-
"Picture each location as a pigeonhole in the memory where you can retrieve information." Kelly said.
The process photographically reduces a pattern of integrated circuits to fit on a tiny memory chip. Information is stored in "locations" within the integrated circuit.
He said that computer information storage capability had increased from 256 locations to 65,000 in the past 10 years.
"I don't think we're going to see those
kind of radical technological breakthroughs in the future," Peters said.
He said that forty years ago it took an IBM calculator to obtain the same power of today in hand-held calculators. Ten years ago, calculators were the size of an IBM typewriter, acerates and a computer.
Peters said he doubted that future calculators would be any smaller.
"The keyboard would be so small that we'd need a magnifying glass," said PAPA. We are getting the point where technology can do that, but it is no longer usable."
However, future calculators will be faster
and perform more functions, according to Kelly. Today's calculators are 1,000 to 100,000 times slower than a computer.
A computer can handle roughly two million instructions per second, according to Kelly.
"Within the next ten years we'll see the speed of many computers available in the hand-held calculator," Kelly said. "It will be a whole computer on a chip."
The difference between calculators and computers already is becoming a question of semantics, according to John Kupf, professor of electrical engineering.
the point where it is difficult to distinguish between calculators and computers," Rupf said.
Computers have a greater programming ability and operate faster, but calculators are catching up, he said.
Calculators today range from the mathematical dabblers that count down to zero or time the laps in a race, to the calculators that translate foreign words and teach spelling.
The "cadillac" in the calculator line, the $200 calculator, has removable parts that permit programming of such issues as finance, mathematics or science.
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