Today, playing field trip mom, I went to a rather impressive small-city aerospace museum. One of the docents, who’d served in the United States Air Force for 20 years, delighted in pointing out that all of the computing power outfitting the early manned spacecraft could now be found inside a typical calculator.

Just a few months ago, HP introduced a new line of calculators, including the HP 20b Business Consultant, which sells for $43.49 from HP directly.

Listen to what this device contains:

—Frequently used business functions, such as TVM (the time value of money — what it’ll cost you later should you decide to hold onto or spend the money you have today), depreciation, and amortization.

—15 statistical analysis functions, four probability distributions, and an advanced math library with trig and hyperbolic functions.

—A two-line display and scroll keys (on a calculator!), which let you scroll through variables, text labels, menus and prompts.

Plus, HP is touting this one as being green. There’s less packaging. That means fewer resources are used up to create the package, plus, less fuel is burned transporting that product around the world.

The company is also talking up a new “clip and zip” feature, which lets you use regular scissors to open up the package. And I think I can safely speak for the entire civilized world when I say that I’m hoping whoever created that plastic that’s used to protect today’s electronic products had a hand sliced off at the wrist shortly after the patent was issued. After all, that’s what the rest of us risk when we attempt to cut those things open. But I digress.

My point is this: Although space travel has come a long way since those early days, so have calculators. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the computing power of the newest generation of rocketry will be found on the shelves of Staples in just a few years.

Posted on September 4th, 2008 by dian