watch it: retro 1970s calculator ad

See, this is why I'm not an early adopter.

~j

My grandparents had an adding machine. It weighed about a thousand pounds and was about the size of a basketball. You would type in the operation you wanted to do (like, 33x123=) and hit whatever the enter/return equivalent was. And it would spit out the answer on this little ticker tape. That thing was AWESOME. And it helps me see why the pocket-size Sharp was a big deal.

Interesting there are no women's voice in the "Boy! Math is hard!" audio montage at the beginning. Were we ladies not doing math in the '70s?

Were we ladies not doing math in the '70s?

You mean you're doing math now?! That's progress, I guess. Good for you guys! Er... girls.

~j

Interesting there are no women's voice in the "Boy! Math is hard!" audio montage at the beginning. Were we ladies not doing math in the '70s?

We were doing math in the '70s... maybe we just didn't find it hard like those men do.

Of course women were doing math, and well before the 1970s, but back then, men were more frequently in a corporate management role that let them take the credit for it.

As a result of this, men were also more frequently given the authority to make financial decisions on the scale of spending $345, which, in 1971 (the year this calculator was first introduced), had the approximate purchasing power of over $1,800 in 2009 money.

(Source for constant dollar calculation: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl)

My first calculator was a Sharp but I must've got it a few years later because it certainly cost a lot less than this! It was great - Polish notation and you could write words if you turned the display upside down. Shelloil! (Admittedly, not very useful words, but little things were entertaining back then.)

My next calculator was a Casio which was sooo cool because it had an LCD display, non-Polish entry, with scientific and statistics functions. I was unreasonably fond of that machine.

Just to be clear, my comment was tongue in cheek. I know women have been doing math for ages -- just found it interesting the ad was clearly not targeted at women.

My grandmother (she of the adding machine) was an entrepreneur, and my other grandmother was an accountant! I had some kick-ass (and math-doing) role models.