"You might be surprised to learn that the calculator chip cannot perform multiplication natively. There's no floating point unit to multiply two numbers." Quit

"You might be surprised to learn that the calculator chip cannot perform multiplication natively. There's no floating point unit to multiply two numbers." Quite true. The sexy multiplier chips from TRW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc. ) were still a few years off, and not intended for mere calculators. Same for the Intel x87 floating point co-processors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8087 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8087). Nowadays the silicon real-estate cost for floating point math is trivial, and chip area is filled out with RAM cache for lack of anything better to do ...