The Engineer’s Best Friend
Being judged on your choice of scientific calculator is a tough thing to handle
The Kings Point SC-40 Scientific Calculator might not have been widely known, but there’s one in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution / National Museum of American History.
In the summer of 1974, I was both looking forward to and somewhat dreading my move that fall to Boulder, Colorado — the home of the University of Colorado. My choice of studies? Civil Engineering. For some odd reason known only to my 16-year-old brain (yes, I was 16 when I started college…), I chose that specific field of engineering because I had dreams of developing new ways of moving people around from place to place. Transportation engineering was not a degree option; it was a subset of the rather broad field of civil engineering.
The anxiety came from the choices I had to make that year: what dorm I wanted to live in on campus, whether or not I wanted to start off with freshman calculus or take a somewhat remedial algebra class, and what I thought was the most important decision of all — which scientific calculator to buy.
Pocket calculators were pretty new at the time. My dad had actually purchased one in (1973, I think). I’m pretty sure it was this — a Sharp EL-8102.
Image via John Wolff.
Pocketable? Barely. It weighed over a pound, actually 1.33 pounds when the batteries were inserted into the back. Speaking of batteries, it burned through six AA batteries pretty quickly unless you plugged it in. It wasn’t exactly svelte. It was a boxy 174mm x 106 mm x 49 mm (6.85″ × 4.17″ × 1.93″). The digits were displayed on a vacuum-fluorescent display with a memorable green glow. It was better than a four-function (add, subtract, multiply, divide) calculator; it actually had square root and percent functions, as well as a single memory.
Despite its clunkiness and ability to eat batteries the way that Joey Chestnut eats hot dogs, calculators like this were extremely rare, so I had to bring this sucker to high school and show it off. My friends were impressed!
I knew very well that an engineering student in 1974 was going to need something more powerful — a scientific calculator that featured trigonometric and logarithmic functions, roots, powers, etc… Some of my nerd buddies had more money than I did (or parents with deep pockets), so they were jumping on the HP-35 — Hewlett-Packard’s scientific calculator that came out in 1972. It used something called Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) in making calculations; there was no equals sign ( = ). Adding two numbers, let’s say 12 and 34, you would type in 12, press the ENTER key, type 34, and press the plus sign ( + ). Up would pop 46 on the display! An algebraic notation calculator would do addition in a much more traditional way — 12+34 =46 .
I won’t go into the wars that were going on between those who preferred the HP calculators with RPN and those in the Texas Instruments (TI) camp who preferred “algebraic notation” — let’s just say that it was as bad as the VHS vs. Beta wars of the early 1980s, or the Mac vs. Windows and iOS vs. Android battles that are still continuing…
TI really didn’t have a true scientific calculator until the end of 1974 with the SR-50; the SR-11 was called a “slide rule calculator” and really didn’t have much more than the standard four function plus square root, squared, and inverse (1/x) functions. During the spring of my senior year of high school and on into the summer, I was desperately looking for a true scientific calculator that didn’t cost as much as the HP-35, yet had true scientific capabilities and didn’t have that weird RPN. Yes, even $195 was considered expensive to me.
That’s why I got quite excited when I found an ad in a magazine for a mail order calculator called the Kings Point SC-40. Yeah, now there’s an electronics company that had staying power... The company was located in Jersey City, NJ and had these calculators built for them in Japan.
It had a red LED display like those TI calculators, a full set of scientific functions, and it was right on the edge of my affordability limit at $149.99. I wrote a check, tucked it into an envelope with the coupon, and a few weeks later I had my calculator in hand.
I have to admit that I was pretty happy with this calculator. It saw me through my first two years of engineering school, got great battery life, and the manuals that it came with had examples of how to perform certain functions that weren’t built in!
SC-40 Scientific Calculator Application Guide and Operating Examples
The only problem with owning the Kings Point SC-40? The crap I got from other engineering students for having an off-brand calculator! Usually the abuse was a sneering look followed by a “What IS that thing?” type of comment as they pulled something like an HP-65 out of their backpack. The bad-mouthing went on for the entire time I owned this device (it was replaced with a Texas Instruments TI-59 in 1977… more about that in a future LifeBits). By the way, technology was advancing so quickly (at least in the calculator field) that the SC-40 was selling for $28 by the time I bought my TI-59.
It’s not as if I really even needed a calculator my freshman year at C.U. Believe it or not, electronic calculators were forbidden in exams until my sophomore year. What did we use to do calculations during tests? Slide rules…
One side of a Pickett Model 4 Slide Rule. Image via Michael O’Leary, International Slide Rule Museum.
Wikipedia refers to slide rules as “hand-operated mechanical calculators”, so you could say that this was the common “calculator” up until 1975 (at least for CU engineering students).
All in all, I guess I should have held on to the SC-40. Who knows? I probably could have sold it to some vintage calculator collector for more than I originally bought it for!
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Until next time… don’t diss somebody because of their choice of scientific calculator!