Canon Pocketronic

The Canon Pocketronic is a history-making calculator, being the first "handheld" battery-powered printing electronic calculator. The Pocketronic was also one of the earliest calculators to use Large Scale Integrated(LSI) Circuits to provide the 'brains' for the calculator, making it small enough to be easily carried around as opposed to other printing calculators of the day that were desktop behemoths. Along with making history as the first handheld printing calculator, the Pocketronic also has an interesting history behind its development. The Pocketronic was preceded by nearly five years by a "skunk-works" project at Texas Instruments. As an outgrowth of the project, Canon and Texas Instruments collaborated to introduce the Pocketronic in Japan in the fall of 1970, and in February of 1971 in the United States. Slightly later, Monroe announced the Monroe Model 10, a repackaged (with a softer, more rounded look) Pocketronic as part of their OEM relationship with Canon.