With LCD screens and segmented characters, calculator technology evolved fast
Here’s how fast the pocket calculator innovated. The first handheld battery-powered calculator, developed by Texas Instruments between 1965 and 1967, and introduced in 1970 as the Canon Pocketronic, used physical, wasteful paper.
The first pocket calculator to use LED lighting, the Busicom LE-120A, came out in 1971. And by 1973, Sharp had introduced the first pocket calculator to use an LCD, a mere five years after RCA introduced the technology to the world.
Why wasn’t it RCA? Well, as with many innovations from the David Sarnoff Research Center, RCA let the LCD fall out of its hands, failing to see that it would eventually replace the color television, the feather in its cap. The issue was a lack of funding and internal support—with a 2012 IEEE Spectrum piece noting how one manager seemed dead-set on minimizing the LCD’s commercial prospects.
RCA would gradually become a footnote, and its consumer electronics arm was decimated in the late 1980s under an ownership reign by General Electric. Other companies would nurse the LCD to commercial viability.
One of the biggest early beneficiaries of RCA failing to commercialize the LCD would be Sharp, in the form of the EL-805, a brick of a device that supported up to eight numbers. It was actually the second calculator to use an LCD—the Accumatic 100, developed by Rockwell under the Lloyd’s brand, beat them to it, but it was not pocket-sized. The EL-805 was a head-turner when it first came out, and it remains one to this day, for one simple reason: Unlike nearly all simple calculators, it used white characters on a black display—a design closer to the LED-based calculators of the period, but one eventually eschewed by calculator makers in favor of a black-on-gray aesthetic.
To be clear, LCDs had plenty of weaknesses. For one thing, unlike Nixie lights or even Numitrons, they were not visible in the dark without additional lighting. And the screens used in calculators had just two modes—off and on—for each object. But the strengths of the LCD in the case of the calculator were massive. Suddenly, a device that required frequent battery replacement now sipped power—per a 1973 Popular Electronics mention, the $109.95 calculator lasted 100 hours on a single penlight battery, meaning you could put it in your bag and not even think about it. And as economies of scale built around these calculators, they also became extremely inexpensive to make, to the point where, by the early 1980s, LED-based calculators were essentially nonentities.