source: thocp.net/TI
When your correspondent reported to Business School, he was prepared to work on sharpening his slide rule skills. Every entering student up to that fateful year was required to use one to accomplish the capacious calculations involved in deriving present values, discovering internal rates of return, and the like. But students entering in 1974 were the first class required to purchase an “electronic calculator.” Your correspondent bought his first, a Texas Instruments SR-10.
So one can imagine his satisfaction at learning that the TI SR-10 is honored in CIO Magazine‘s list of “The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Last 50 Years” (as indeed it has been by its inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute)… Scan the full list for a roster of gizmos and devices that have changed lives over the last half-century.
As we reach for fresh batteries, we might strain to hear Nero’s noodling on the fiddle, as it was on this date in 64 CE that Rome began to burn.
