On Sat, 18 Sep 2021, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote: Yes, and possibly also deeper. It was not considered a MAJOR expense/struggle to buy a personal computer. Some of which may have been that despite the exchange rate of 1.50 USD - 2.50 USD per GBP (British pound), a product costing 1500 USD would be sold for 1500 GBP. At one point, there was an enormous battle for what would be the "shirt pocket disk". The battle was between 3", 3.25", and 3.5". Dysan bet the company on 3.25", because they would need the least retooling. They reasoned that it would settle on whichever one had the software. They launched an enormous software distribution venture. For a little while, you could buy most of the biggest products (Lotus, Wordstar, dBase, etc.) on 3.25"! Amusingly, the Seequa Chameleon 325 was the only machine that made it to market using 3.25". When HP, Apple, and IBM chose the Sony 3.5", the battle was over. During the heat of the battle, George Morrow suggested that we merely cut a deal with the clothing industry to make pockets 5.25". Both BBC and the Grauniad (Guardian) flatly stated it in announcing his death! https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58587521 "Inventor Sir Clive Sinclair, who popularised the home computer and invented the pocket calculator, has died at his London home aged 81." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/17/sir-clive-sinclair As usual, all claims of "FIRST" can be argued through the definitions. "That one doesn't count, because it was over $200; that one doesn't count, because we only consider SHIRT pockets; that one doesn't count because it couldn't run off of its batteries for more than a few minutes, . . . " In 1972, my boss, who was French, had a French coat pocket sized calculator. Because it was stored in my desk drawer, I was listed as "Head Of Computing Services" when my company bid on guvmint contracts. While in the field on the EPA contract to study water pollution control efforts in the Great Lakes, I first saw an HP35. On that project, I set up a microfilming rig with one of my ancient Leicas, and our report had an 8,000 page documentary appendix. (but NO computing) On our CEQ project, we did some trivial FORTRAN programs, and were the FIRST to ever correlate water quality with flow rates, and demonstrated that the phosphates were due to agricultural runoff, NOT laundry. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Sat, 18 Sep 2021, dwight via cctalk wrote: I think that the Sinclair used TI calculator ICs. Unless he had a special "in" with TI, AND was fastest to market, then it is doubtful that he could legitimately claim to be "FIRST".

Fred Cisin wrote on Sat, 18 Sep 2021 13:45:04 -0700 (PDT) The TI people were selling their chip as a simple four operation calculator. Here is what the Sinclair people did with it: http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simulator.html An interesting project that Sir Clive was involved in was the wafer scale integration effort by Ivor Catt. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8199/Anamartic-Limited/ The goal was to eventually do what the Cerebras people are now doing (with lots of positive press), but their first products attempted to replace hard disks with battery-backed wafer scale SRAMs. The many-core processors would come later, but as HD densities took off (after only having grown slowly from the mid 1970s to mid 1980s) the investors pulled out. -- Jecel

On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 00:01, Jecel Assumpcao Jr via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: And that's where the "world's first" comes from: ".. the world's first single-chip scientific calculator," - i.e. not the first pocket calculator, of course. Just the first single-chip scientific calculator, or at least the first low-priced one (and the smallest one too, at the time).