The Merging of Calculators and Computers: A Look to the Future of Technology Enhanced Teaching and L

Introduction Ten years ago desk top computers and calculators were viewed as quite different. Computers were powerful, expensive, and ran sophisticated software. Calculators were inexpensive and did only elementary numerical computations. Electronic calculators are now over 25 years old while desk top computers are only about 20 years old. The first electronic calculators were simple "four function" devices that did only basic arithmetic such as the Texas Instruments "DataMath" costing $120 US in 1972. They were soon followed by the so called ìscientific calculatorî or "electronic slide ruleî that did sophisticated transcendental computations with 8 to 12 digit accuracy. The first scientific calculator was the HP-35 introduced in 1972 (it cost $395 US). The first desktop computers were slow and had little memory 32K(!) but were powerful and hinted at things to come. In 1979 the first spreadsheet VisiCalc was introduced for the Apple II PC and suddenly the world saw a reason to buy a desktop computer!