At the beginning of our first academic year at Royal Roads, our profs strongly encouraged us to purchase an electronic calculator for use in our studies. We had been issued slide rules along with our textbooks and other school supplies, but it was implied that the purchase of a calculator would all but guarantee academic success. We were advised that the Texas Instruments Slide Rule Calculator SR 50A, introduced just a few months earlier in the spring of 1975, was the instrument of choice. By happy coincidence, the college canteen had a special offer; put your name on a list, surrender the lion’s share of a month’s pay (at the time, the calculators retailed for about $150, which is something like $750 today!) and some weeks later, the devices would be delivered. And what electronic marvels they were! I had had very little prior experience with calculators; on occasion, my father had brought home from work a plug-in, desktop machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and print the results on paper tape. The SR 50A could do those same arithmetic functions, and well over a dozen other more esoteric mathematical functions, like exponents, summation, trigonometric functions, logarithms, etc., etc. And it displayed the results with ten-digit precision on a glowing LED display. Initially, at least, the scientific capabilities of the calculator tended to be lost on us randy adolescents; we were more impressed by the fact that if one held the calculator upside down and keyed in certain numeric strings, ribald expressions would be displayed. One calculator-based amusement which quickly became popular, especially during the tedious MLM lectures presented by an officer whose deadly monotone delivery earned him the sobriquet “Captain Sominex”, was the factorial race. Participants would enter the largest integer for which the calculator’s chipset could compute the factorial. (That that number was sixty-nine was a source of endless mirth for our prurient minds.) Then on pre-arranged signal, the participants would press the key labelled x! and wait breathlessly while the tiny integrated circuits laboured to produce the result. The first calculator to display “1.711224524  98” was declared the winner. 

Me and a fellow bud (who shall remain nameless, as he should have had more sense) graduated from these juvenile pastimes and instead began engaging in analysis of the devices’ point of failure, specifically, destructive testing by means of defenestration. During a yet another seemingly interminable MLM lecture, we were sat at the very back of the lecture theatre, i.e., in the highest row of seats, next to an open window. The lecture theatre was located on the third deck of Grant Block. Towards the end of the lecture, to relieve our tedium, we decided to toss our calculators, in their protective cases, out of the window, then dash downstairs and out onto the circle to ascertain whether they had survived the impact. In a testament to the robust engineering of Texas Instruments’ products, they did! Having had the scientific method hammered into our heads, we repeated the experiment on several subsequent occasions, with identical results. To paraphrase a Timex watch slogan from the sixties, those calculators took a licking and kept on… calculating. 

For those who would like to relive the heady days of factorial racing, but are no longer in possession of their beloved SR 50A, there is an SR 50 emulator on this web page:

https://scientific601.altervista.org/sr50/sr50.html

(Note: I assume no responsibility for smartphones, tablets, or desktop computers tossed out of buildings, moving cars, or flying aircraft.)