So a couple of days ago I gathered up all my forms and receipts and whatnot, found a couple of pencils that still had erasers on them, cleared off the table, went and found a calculator, and set to work. After a while I sat and looked at my little black calculator. It does simple arithmetic and suits my purposes. But unlike my children, I haven t always had a calculator. There once was a time when there were no calculators, when simple arithmetic was done by hand.
Calculators really are a remarkable device.
The innards are descendants of the transistor, which were begatted by vacuum tubes. Two hundred years ago, well maybe longer than that, five hundred years ago, if I d have walked into a church and showed someone my calculator and demonstrated it for them, it probably would have been seen as some form of witchcraft or magic. That s just how the world was understood and encountered back then. Today I understand that some electrons are swooshing through some silicon and are somehow figuring out that 38 divided by 91 is .41758. In my world electrons do stuff like that all the time, even though you can never see them, and if you try to see them they change into something else or change their temperature or something.