casio al-8
| the casio al-8 is a handy little machine for
quick and easy calculation. it was the first calculator to support
fractions and released in 1976. it was quickly superseded by the al-10
which is the same but with a ten digit display.
although fractions was an exciting new feature, the 8 digit display was a major limitation with this machine. fractions are represented using a separator symbol which takes up one digit position. thus only 6 digits are available to display a fraction when a whole part is included. so for example, the number 355/226 cannot be displayed, because once reduced becomes 1/129/226 which requires 9 digits. i often wonder why casio did not choose to use the decimal point symbol to delimit the fractional parts. each digit of the display can display a dot as well as the 7 number segments. the above example would then display as, 1.129.226. pure fractions would show a zero whole part, eg 0.1.2 for 1/2 otherwise they might be confused with floating point numbers. sometimes this model would suffer the sticky button problem. |
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