Technological Changes

I interviewed my grandmother, Gun Elofson, to find out how technology has changed over the course of her life. She is currently almost 65 years old and lives in Yakima, which is about a two hour drive from Bellevue. My grandmother immigrated to the United States from Sweden, so she didn't go to college until the 1970's. When she was in college, only one person in her entire math class had a calculator, which happened to be her roommate. Her roommate showed my grandmother her calculator which was very different from today's calculator. The calculator that my grandmother's roommate had was bigger than today's largest cell phones and it still only had three functions. Its only three functions were that it could add, subtract, and find the square roots of numbers. In addition, the calculators cost around $400 for just one. Today, TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculator from Texas Instruments costs about $130. There are many more functions and it is more portable and handy. Some of today's most expensive calculators and about half of the price of what the calculators were in the 1960's to the mid-1970's.

Before fully electronic calculators were invented in 1963, people had to do all of their calculations by hand. The invention of calculators made math a lot easier and sped up calculations. It also made calculations much more accurate, which helped stores and banks because it can assure that payments are being made fairly and that transactions and purchases are done correctly. Before calculations, people working at check out areas in stores would have to calculate the price of one's purchases by hand which took a much longer time than by calculators. However, many American teachers believed that calculators being used in class should be considered cheating, so not many students were allowed to use them in class. The calculators also were bad for the environment because there was a lot of plastic and other materials needed to make them. In addition, the invention of calculators had both a negative and positive effect on the economy. The negative side was that jobs that originally required multiple people to calculate things were reduced to only one person because calculations were sped up. However, with less people needed to do the jobs, the stores could offer goods at lower prices. Also, the invention of calculators introduced something new to the manufacturing business. There was a high demand, so there was