Great article! Another interesting phenomena about calculators: Despite the cost of computing steadily going down (ala Moore’s Law), something like a TI-85 cost about the same in 2024 as it did in 1998…
Hah! Although strictly speaking, it's half the price if you adjust for inflation (+93%).
But in general, the price of most electronics has relatively little to do with the cost of components. The components are so cheap that you're mostly paying for the company's operating costs, including design, marketing, office lease, and so on.
If anything, I'd imagine that the component costs of cranking out "classic" calculators might be going up because the supply chains for Z80 chips or crummy monochrome dot-matrix LCDs might be drying up!
The last bastion of calculator is the school where students can use the help of it to compute some awkward values but are discouraged from cheating by use of internet or LLMs.
1902, two vulnerabilities in the Marconi Wireless Telegraph is where I start my history of vulnerability talk, then move into WW2 and the electromechanical rotor cipher machines, on to phone systems followed by mainframes. Once you hit early mainframe vulns, there simply aren't stories around them like the prior. So I appreciate you looking at history from this perspective.
Great article! Another interesting phenomena about calculators: Despite the cost of computing steadily going down (ala Moore’s Law), something like a TI-85 cost about the same in 2024 as it did in 1998…
Hah! Although strictly speaking, it's half the price if you adjust for inflation (+93%).
But in general, the price of most electronics has relatively little to do with the cost of components. The components are so cheap that you're mostly paying for the company's operating costs, including design, marketing, office lease, and so on.
If anything, I'd imagine that the component costs of cranking out "classic" calculators might be going up because the supply chains for Z80 chips or crummy monochrome dot-matrix LCDs might be drying up!
Great article! I think that the Curta is also so popular because of William Gibson's book "Pattern Recognition".
The last bastion of calculator is the school where students can use the help of it to compute some awkward values but are discouraged from cheating by use of internet or LLMs.
1902, two vulnerabilities in the Marconi Wireless Telegraph is where I start my history of vulnerability talk, then move into WW2 and the electromechanical rotor cipher machines, on to phone systems followed by mainframes. Once you hit early mainframe vulns, there simply aren't stories around them like the prior. So I appreciate you looking at history from this perspective.
Awesome article and an impressive collection :)