I didn’t actually know about the Casio 14-A until now. I almost thought the picture was AI-generated. Four functions squeezed into that compact desktop unit in 1957? Impossible with the technology of the time… The Casio 14-A was indeed the world’s first all-electric desk calculator. But by “desk calculator,” they literally mean “a desk that is a calculator.” The display/keyboard pictured was literally attached to a d…
I always heard those old mechanical calculators called "adding machines" presumably because addition is all they could do?
You’re not wrong. They work very similar to binary arithmetic: basically the only operations they can do is increment, decrement, and shift left/right (but by 10)
But multiplication is just repeated addition, and division is just repeated subtraction. Some of the highest-end units could do square roots! Check out CuriousMarc’s videos.