If you think about the technology in the 70s and wonder what a home made calculator would look like this is exactly what I have in mind. A wooden box is used to house multiple small circuit boards and reams of colored wires connect everything together. I remember hearing about the Woz designing many of his creations on paper rather than with actual electronics since the parts were so expensive. In this case the cost of purchasing a similar calculator made building one from scratch a viable option. This is almost unthinkable these days where you can get a calculator for less than a dollar and it has a built in battery and solar power as a backup!

Via Hack a Day

“Back in the good old days of the early 1970s, small desktop calculators were made by several companies. However, they cost quite a lot of money. The average engineer didn’t have that much cash lying around, but still wanted to relieve himself of the burdens of manual mathematical computations.”