There was a brief period through the 1960s into the 1970s when the last word in electronics was the calculator. New models sold for hundreds of dollars, and owning one made you very special indeed.

Before the electronic calculator, there was the mechanical calculator, a heavy device often about the size of a small computer that cost thousands in today’s dollars. They were indispensable tools ...

Everyone learns in grade school that you can’t divide by zero, but few of us ever learn (or fully understand) why. The stock answer is that it gives you an answer of infinity. The truth is a bit more ...

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a ...

Iofree has created a new retro mechanical calculator called the Digit which it has launched via Kickstarter this week and already blasted past its required pledge goal thanks to over 450 backers with ...

This chaos of churning gears comes down to a fairly simple explanation. Division is just a series of sequential subtraction, and division by zero is the sequential subtraction of zero, over and over ...

Dividing by zero is complicated and we all know it's something you can't and shouldn't do. The simple—but still not perfect—explanation is that if you divide something by zero, the answer approaches ...

I first learned about the Curta from this January 2004 article in Scientific American, by Cliff Stoll. Unfortunately, the article is not available for free. But you can purchase a PDF of the whole Jan ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. The Curta was a small, hand-cranked ...

I was just in an email ‘conversation’ with someone when I mentioned my Curta mechanical calculator, and he responded “Pictures Please!” so here we are… Just in case you haven’t heard about this before ...