My father was at the time a manufacturing engineer at a Texas Instruments plant in Attleboro, Mass., so the McNamara children had an early glimpse at this newfangled machine that could do math.
Sure, Dad, whatever; if we can’t use it on arithmetic tests, who cares? (Hey, we were kids and technology was not yet cool).
Fast-forward 40 years and the TI-58 and TI-59 – don’t ask me which one I saw as a 10-year-old – are now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
Jerry Merryman was part of a small team at TI given the task (in 1965) of creating a handheld calculator. Numerous problems arose, according to Merryman. The calculator had to work at low power, and it required a reliable keyboard and a chip with thousands of transistors. Nevertheless, a working model was delivered 18 months later, in 1967 – giving TI the world’s first electronic handheld calculator.
Merryman was asked at a ceremony held here on Tuesday if he thought the device would have the impact that it did. “No, really,” he said. “I thought a few accountants might use them. I thought some engineering students might get them as presents. It was only later that I realized we were kicking off [the electronics] revolution.”
Nice to know I wasn’t the only one failing to grasp the magnitude of the moment.
As I’ve told the story over the years, that first calculator has varied in size from that of a shoebox to practically a breadbox. I trust that’s merely the passage of time combined with youthful inattentiveness, but the story today does mention that the first prototype weighed three pounds.
Not exactly pocket-size, now was it.
