| The humble calculator
can be found in pretty much every home and office in the country,
and has become a commodity that is taken for granted. Early electronic
calculators were large and cumbersome, and because of the inefficient
circuitry of the time they required a lot more power than could reasonably
be provided by battery, and as such they had to be mains powered.
Technology never stays still, and as more and more improvements
were made in the development of integrated circuits and battery
performance calculators began to shrink to sizes that could be considered
portable, and with onboard power they no longer needed mains power
in order to function.
It was this break into true portability which really kick-started
the popularity of the calculator, being able to take it with you
or even just have one to share among the office staff really opened
up the calculator market and since then calculating percentages
and rates has never been the same. Development of the technology
continued and the models gradually shrunk and began to offer more
and more features, such as memory recall and solar power to remove
the need for batteries completely.
Today there are literally hundreds of models of calculator to choose
from, ranging from those that are included in a wrist-watch to full-function
devices that include a printer to reel of the calculations and results
for future reference. Scientific calculators offer a plethora of functions
and operations, such as equation solving and many can even plot graphs
of results that can also be downloaded to a computer.
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