Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs ...

Before there were smartphones, there were personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor, and Compaq/HP iPAQ line of devices. And before those, there were really basic PDAs, like ...

Form is temporary, function is permanent. The most important inventions are the ones that relate to the human condition, and they crop up over and over again. Below, Houston shares five key insights ...

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. By Keith Houston. W.W. Norton & Company; 384 pages; $32.50. To be published in Britain in October; £25 WHEN WAS the last time you used a ...

Sir Clive Sinclair, who popularised the home computer and invented the pocket calculator, has died aged 81. His daughter Belinda Sinclair told The Guardian that her father died at his London home on ...

Historian Houston (Shady Characters) surveys the evolution of mathematical calculation, from prehistory to the 20th century, in this informative study. Beginning with a chapter on “The Hand,” Houston ...

English entrepreneur and inventor Clive Sinclair (left) on 30 September in 1964. (Photo by Victor Blackman/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Inventor Sir Clive Sinclair – the man behind the ...

Clive Sinclair, who invented the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer, died of cancer Thursday at age 81, his family confirmed. Sinclair was an inventor with an impressive list of ...

Jerry Merryman, a self-taught electrical engineer who helped design the first pocket calculator, died on Feb. 27 in Dallas. He was 86. His wife, Phyllis (Lee) Merryman, said the cause was heart and ...