On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 18:05 -0500, Walter Banks wrote:
> 
> Herbert Graf wrote:
> 
> > FWIW, even some modern calculators can take a while. A friend of mine
> > had a calculator that took nearly a second when involving certain
> > functions (sin/cos/tan come to mind, ln/log I believe as well).
> 
> The compute time in some of the calculator 30 years ago is legendary.
> Sinclair made a calculator that used a bit serial processor. One of the
> trig functions took 8 minutes and generally got the wrong answer.

Hehe, well that's not very useful! Even today though, some calculators
do certain operations very slowly, while others are lightning fast. It
can get quite annoying when trying to solve long equations.

IIRC my friend's "slow" calculator was a Casio, my "instant" calculator
was a Sharp.

TTYL

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