I’m the operator with my pocket calculator

In what’s become a yearly event, the financial news is buzzing with news from the juncture of consumerism, high-tech products, and holiday shopping. When I flipped on the radio this morning it was covering sales figures for TVs, iPads, and smartphones.

Well, sorry to disappoint the retail analysts out there, but last week I scooped up the coolest tech item on the market. I got it at a junk store for $4. It’s the TI-30 scientific calculator.

This is more than a mere machine. And this is higher than high-tech. This, folks, is pure magic.

The TI-30 is the Mother of All Calculators. No, it wasn’t the first electronic calculator, just as Ford’s Model T wasn’t the first car. But, just as the Model T changed everything when it hit the streets, so did the TI-30.

The TI-30 came out in 1976. It was affordable (about $25 back then), easy to use, and it put serious calculating power in the hands of normal folks. It pulled us out of the horse-and-buggy days of numbers.

It is said that the TI-30 was the best-selling calculator of all times. I’m not interested in auditing the claim, so I’m happy to take it at face value.

Anyway, when I emerged from the junk store with my $4 treasure, complete with its retro faux-denim plastic carrying case (with belt loop), my pals thought I had a terminal case of nerdiness. OK, maybe I shouldn’t have worn it on my belt in public.

Well, no, I should have, and I’m glad I did, since I wasn’t a nerd for long. I was the proud owner of a genuine conversation piece. After our junk store foray we visited some friends who run a high-brow jewelry store. The TI-30 proved to be a more compelling bauble than the diamonds and emeralds. The warm red glow of the 8-digit LED display stirs up memories just like a favorite old song does.

The “TI,” incidentally, stands for Texas Instruments, a company ultimately rooted in the oil industry and credited, among other things, with inventing the integrated circuit in 1958.

Owning a TI-30 was a badge of honor in high school. It enabled students to focus on learning mathematical principles instead of getting bogged down grinding out calculations or looking things up in tables. The parenthesis and the inverse (1/x) keys made for a smooth computational proposition, and what a blessing that was, since, up until that point, the calculators I encountered were merely glorified adding machines.

Alas, as great as the TI-30 was, by the time I hit college everything had changed. A new generation of calculators swept aside the prior generation just as New Wave music was burying disco. That wasn’t just an American thing, and, as if to emphasize the gig, German techno-group Kraftwerk came out with the song “I’m the operator with my pocket calculator,” a true anthem for nerds.

You’re probably familiar with Hewlett-Packard printers, but back in the day HP was probably best known for its calculators. Meanwhile, Sharp, a Japanese company, came out with some real dandies, and even Radio Shack had a leading-edge programmable calculator.

The popularity of various calculators probably varied by region back then. In college we’d buy what the professors told us to buy, since methods to solve problems were often based on using a certain type of calculator. Likewise, later on in the work force, in finance circles you could fail a job interview if you couldn’t demonstrate mastery of an HP calculator.

Everybody is all gaga about computers these days, and, yes, they sure do great things, but I think they’ve been a two-edged sword. Long ago, the U.S. came down with a case of spreadsheetitis, and you couldn’t go out for a cup of coffee without some bore tugging on your sleeve to show you his 800-year financial projections complete with color graphs, 17 different fonts, and five pages of boilerplate accounting ratios. Indeed, for all the prohibitions on worshiping false gods, people sure seem to worship false numbers with doom-struck reverence. On that note you can point the blame where you see fit, but I’ll note that wherever you wag your finger, calculators aren’t the culprit.

Far from being the culprit, the humble calculator is still the hero in my book. For example, I’m more inclined to amortize a mortgage using a calculator than a computer. Using the calculator is faster. Furthermore, and we’re getting to some true nitty-gritty here, it’s a good practice to spot check spreadsheet calculations using a calculator. After all, if you can’t poke through the calculations like that, then you probably don’t understand them, and that’s where the trouble starts.

Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground for a $4 junk store purchase. The TI-30 is a door to the past because in the past it was a door to the future. You can’t say that about many things. And even if you could, how many of them can you wear on your belt?