Hacker News Reader

There were (quite capable) desktop calculators, but just barely (1968): http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm

But color TV had been widely available for about a decade. In fact, I watched the 1969 moon landings on my parents 1961 color Zenith. (They had rotary phone well into the 80s, however.)

View on HN

My mother had one of the early SCM Marchant electronic calculators in her lab http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/scm240sr.html. I don't remember the exact date but looks like it looks like it would have been late 1960s as well. I remember how laughably slow it was doing square roots; you could watch it going through some sort of successive approximation algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com