Everyone learns in grade school that you can’t divide by zero, but few of us ever learn (or fully understand) why. The stock answer is that it gives you an answer of infinity. The truth is a bit more ...

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a ...

“The first digital use of the transistor for consumers was in a calculator,” says Rick Bensene, curator of the Old Calculator Web Museum. Our series on the birth of the transistor — and with it, the ...

Remove the outer casing on the Monroe PC-1421, a 1964 mechanical calculator, and this is what you’ll find. Courtesy of Kevin Twomey Mark Glusker had heard rumors about the mechanical calculator, a ...

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., willl unveil a recreation of Charles Babbages 19th century mechanical digital calculator, the Difference Engine No. 2. Starting in May, many will ...

This chaos of churning gears comes down to a fairly simple explanation. Division is just a series of sequential subtraction, and division by zero is the sequential subtraction of zero, over and over ...