cheap calculator

I read an ad for WalMart today for a Texas Instruments IT-30X IIS 2-Line Scientific Calculator for $12.

I worked for Monroe Calculators back in the early 70’s in Odessa, TX, as a salesman. Our main models were a rather large and clunky calculator (about the size of an average VCR or maybe a little larger) and a hand-held calculator (about the size of a larger paperback). The calculator was around $400 and the calculator (which only added, subtracted, divided and multiplied) was $150. Monroe was proud of it.

Then, Texas Instruments invented the chip. And it drove Monroe out of business.

Hewlett Packard had a programmable 35 function scientific calculator that cost just a few dollars more than our hand-held unit, but did everything but make coffee. And everywhere we went to show our model, they had been.

What do you have like this, someone would say, holing up the TI unit. Nothing, I would say and leave. And we had nothing to compete with it.

Besides, Monroe Calculators had made the astonishing business decision to go all American. No more of that Japanese junk.

It was a magnificently stupid move and it killed them as a company. I thought it was funny when Doc Brown in Back to the Future talked about Japanese junk and Marty McFly told him all the good stuff was made in Japan. It threw Doc Brown for a loop. Who could have known? In the 50 and 60’s, stuff from Japan was substandard and throwaway.

Of course, Hewlett Packard knew. Japanese stuff was fixing to become good stuff. And Monroe found out real soon.

That all came back to me when I read the article.