"Jerry Merryman, 'brilliant' man who was an inventor of the calculator dies” was the headline on a Technology story in Stuff on March 6 2019.
SoBad recalls his first calculator which could only display 4 digits, with an arrow to show the next 4. It cost him a week and a half’s wages.
Mrs Sobad recalls the ‘calculator lab’ from her time at university - the calculators were chained to the desks and only 2nd year students or above were allowed to use them.
Now almost all school children carry a $10 calculator that would do more than the expensive ones of the past.
To get the actual coordinates for the cache you need to find out a bit more about the history of the hand held calculator.
- The first handheld pocket calculator was invented at TI. a is the number of letters in the full word for T.
- The prototype was called ….. Tech. It could add subtract multiply and divide and the output was paper tape. The number of letters in the missing part of the name is b.
- There were three people in the team that invented the Miniature Electronic Calculator. One also was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics. The number of letters in his surname is c.
- The Miniature Electronic Calculator patent was first filed in 1967 and awarded in 1974. The patent number was 3 819 92d.
- The Datamath or TI 2500 first sold for $ e 49.95.
- The HP-f5, introduced on February 1, 1972, was Hewlett-Packard's first pocket calculator and the world's first handheld scientific calculator.
If P is e, Q is d, R is a-c, T is b+f, U is a, and V is b, the cache is at
South 41 12.PQR East 173 21.TUV
Bring your own pen/cil that can write on waterproof paper. The final spot is rather random, but there is a sign nearby that made us think it was appropriate.
The title comes from the old trick of turning the screen on older calculators upside down to create words/messages. 4615 was 'sigh'.
And a ‘joke’
How do you say goodbye to a calculus teacher?
Calculator!