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The cheap Sinclair Scientific calculator (1974) was rather primitive, so instead of storing constants internally, it printed constants such as e and pi on the c
by kens 6y ago
The cheap Sinclair Scientific calculator (1974) was rather primitive, so instead of storing constants internally, it printed constants such as e and pi on the case. The calculator was rather inaccurate, so you were much better off using 3.14159 from the case than computing 4×atan(1), which gave 3.1440.
- taylodl 6y agoIt'd be interesting to see their implementation and the trade-offs its designers made.
- kens 6y agoI'm glad you asked :-) I reverse-engineered the Sinclair Scientific calculator, documented its code, and built a simulator: http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simulator.html http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul... The short answer is that they used a 4-function calculator chip with just 320 words of ROM and managed to reprogram it into a cheap scientific calculator, a remarkable feat. The tradeoff was that the calculator was very slow and inaccurate.
- taylodl 6y agoThat's amazing! Thank you for sharing!