Keith Houston's Blog, page 5

We have more winners!

Congratulations to Robert Oesterreich and Fred Grant, winners of the second round of the Empire of the Sum giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all entrants who replied to the original post about the competition.

If you won, congratulations, and look out for an email from me arranging delivery of your copy of Empire. If not, don’t despair — for US readers, Empire is in shops now; for everyone else, there will be more giveaways soon.

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Calculator of the day: the Casio QL-10 Calculighter

It’s out! Empire of the Sum is now available in the US, and to mark the occasion I’ve been posting about a few of my favourite calculators. I’m closing this series for now with perhaps the apotheosis of 1980s calculator design: the 1981 Casio QL-10 Calculighter.

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We have winners – and a new competition!

Congratulations to Mary Ann Atwood and John W. Stuart, winners of the first round of the Empire of the Sum giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all entrants who replied the original post about the competition. Thank you all for entering! If you won, congratulations, and look out for an email from me arranging delivery of your copy of Empire. If not, read on.

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Calculators: a #patentedpodcast with Dallas Campbell

I had a lot of fun a few months back recording an interview with Dallas Campbell on the subject of book history for his podcast, Patented. At least someone else must have enjoyed it too, because Dallas invited me back for another episode, this time on digital calculators. Have a listen and let me know what you think!

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Calculator of the day: the HP-35

It’s out! Empire of the Sum is now available in the US, and to mark the occasion I’m posting about a few of my favourite calculators. Today’s is the Hewlett-Packard HP-35, a scientific calculator that today looks quite unremarkable — and yet which, at the time, was revelatory.

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Empire of the Sum extracted in Lapham’s Quarterly

If you’d like to get a flavour of Empire of the Sum, check out this extract in Lapham’s Quarterly! It’s taken from the first chapter of the book, and, spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with the image (above) they’ve chosen to illustrate it — although Hollerith’s machines do make an appearance later in the book, and, coincidentally enough, I wrote about them a few years back in the context of the Monotype machine. Everything old is new again!

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Calculator of the day: the Canon Pocketronic

It’s out! Empire of the Sum was published yesterday in the US, and to mark the occasion I’m posting about a few of my favourite calculators. Today we’re taking a look at the Canon Pocketronic, a machine with a decent claim to being the first ever pocket electronic calculator.

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It’s US publication day for Empire of the Sum!

It’s publication day! Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator is published today in the USA. You can order a copy from from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, IndieBound, Powell’s, Target or Walmart.

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Calculator of the day: Monroe MonroMatic 8N-213

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US tomorrow (‼️), the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. Today, we’re looking at a calculator used by a remarkable person indeed: the late Katherine Johnson, a “human computer” and mathematician at NASA’s laboratory in Langley, Virginia.

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Calculator of the day: the Curta

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US on Tuesday the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. This time, we’re taking a look at the “math grenade”, as William Gibson calls it in his novel Pattern Recognition — the mechanical, cylindrical, pocketable Curta.

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