Calculator

A calculator is a device for performing numerical calculations. The type is considered distinct from both a calculating machine and a computer in that the calculator is a special-purpose device that may not qualify as a Turing machine. Although modern calculators often incorporate a general purpose computer, the device as a whole is designed for ease of use to perform specific operations, rather than for flexibility.

Trivia

• The word "calculator" is occasionally used as a pejorative term to describe an inadequately capable general-purpose microcomputer. The synonym of this meaning is "bitty box", as discussed in the Jargon file.
• A curious episode of the mid 1970s involved the Melcor 635, a scientific calculator with a bug in its trigonometric functions. Because the CORDIC algorithms used in most calculators cannot compute the inverse trigonometric functions of zero, these need to be hardcoded — and some engineer at Melcor got it wrong. For any input other than exactly zero, even for instance 1.0E-99, the calculator worked correctly; the user simply had to remember not to compute the arc-cosine of zero. The company discovered this after making 50,000 calculators. The upshot was an advertisement in Scientific American headlined 'Somebody Goofed', offering these calculators for sale at half-price.
• As many schoolchildren and students know, some words and simple phrases can be written using an ordinary seven-segment display calculator; this involves entering certain numbers and then viewing the resulting words by turning the calculator display upside-down. Some of the larger words/phrases obtainable in this fashion are:
• BOOB = 8008, BOOBIES = 5318008, BOOBLESS = 55378008
• LEgS = 5637
• hELL = 7734, hELLO = 0.7734
• gO2hELL = 7734206
• DEBIL = 71830 ("moron" or "imbecil" in Polish and Czech, also "retarded" in German and "weak" in Spanish)
• hEI = 134 ("hi" in Norwegian and in Finnish)
• BEBE = 3838 ("baby" in Spanish and French)
• BOLILLO = 0.771708 ("Piece of bread" in Spanish)
• OhIO = 0.140
• ShELLOIL = 710.77345 (following a series of hypothetical computations on monopoly theory)
• ESEL = 7353 ("donkey" or "moron" in German)
• OSEL = 7350, OSLE = 3750 ("donkey" or "moron" in Czech, the second one is the vocative case "you, donkey!")
• LESBO = 0.8537
• SIEg.hEIL = 7134.6315 (Sieg Heil was the Nazi Salute of the Germans towards Hitler)