1967 · Integrated-Circuit Handheld Prototype · Work 930 of 1,871
The corner office of an electronics executive in Dallas in Texas on a spring morning, on a polished walnut desk a small angular box of black-painted metal sixteen centimetres long, eleven centimetres wide and four centimetres thick, its plain smooth black face set with four small screws and eighteen plain smooth black keys, near its top edge a narrow window and a small slide switch, from its upper corner a thin strip of plain pink paper curling across the desk, a hand in a dark suit sleeve and white cuff lifting the curling strip, a heavy glass ashtray and a fountain pen stand, wide windows onto a flat green plain.
What it was used for
A prototype of a battery-powered printing pocket calculator, never a product. In 1965 TI president Patrick Haggerty ordered the semiconductor laboratory in Dallas to build a calculator of pocket size; Jack Kilby led the team, Jerry Merryman took memory and processor, James Van Tassel the keyboard. The breadboard filled 3 large tables; the first working unit ran in December 1966. It was shown to a few calculator makers; the first unit went to Haggerty as a memento: the engraving on the Smithsonian's example names it the first Cal Tech and 29 March 1967 as the day it was handed to Haggerty. It measures 4.4 × 10.8 × 15.9 cm, has 17 keys plus a zero bar and no display at all, only a thermal printer. TI chose not to enter the market itself: management looked for a partner, and the work reached buyers in 1970 as the Canon Pocketronic, under another company's name.
What was new
Electronic desktop calculators already existed, mains-powered and desk-sized. The Cal-Tech did something else: a built-in rechargeable battery, the 4 basic operations in a package the size of a book, with printed output. In place of a display, which did not exist at that size, a thermal printer wrote on paper supplied by 3M. Inside were 4 bipolar gate-array circuits and 3 shift registers of 24 bits each, all from TI's own line. Patent US 3,819,921 was granted only on 25 June 1974, 7 years after the machine was handed over.
What the sources leave open: Smithsonian and the Old Calculator Web Museum agree on the March 1967 handover, and only the Smithsonian gives the patent; the museum dates the project start to 1965 and the first working unit to December 1966. The patent date given is the grant date, not the filing date.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.