Calculator This led the way to the first credit-card-sized calculators, such as the Casio "Mini Card LC-78" of 1978, which could run for months of normal use on button cells. There were also improvements to the electronics inside the calculators. All of the logic functions of a calculator had been squeezed into the first "calculator on a chip" integrated circuits (ICs) in 1971, but this was leading edge technology of the time and yields were low and costs were high. Many calculators continued to use two or more ICs, especially the scientific and the programmable ones, into the late 1970s. The
Calculator 1976, the cost of the cheapest four-function pocket calculator had dropped to a few dollars, about 1/20th of the cost five years before. The results of this were that the pocket calculator was affordable, and that it was now difficult for the manufacturers to make a profit from calculators, leading to many firms dropping out of the business or closing down. The firms that survived making calculators tended to be those with high outputs of higher quality calculators, or producing high-specification scientific and programmable calculators. The first calculator capable of symbolic computing was the HP-28C, released in 1987. It could,