"The first calculators tended to sell for $400 or $500. Today, you can get a pretty good one for 4 or $5"
About this Quote
Kilby’s numbers look like casual consumer trivia, but they’re really a quiet victory lap for the integrated circuit and the economic logic it unleashed. A calculator dropping from $500 to $5 isn’t just “technology got better.” It’s a compressed story about scale, standardization, and the strange way invention only becomes world-changing once it gets boringly cheap.
The intent is partly pedagogical: take an abstract breakthrough in microelectronics and translate it into a household object everyone understands. Kilby doesn’t cite transistor density curves or fabrication yields; he cites a price tag. That’s shrewd rhetoric from a scientist speaking to a public that experiences innovation as affordability. The subtext is also a subtle claim of authorship. As a key figure in the integrated circuit’s early development, Kilby is pointing to downstream consequences that validate the original leap: the miracle isn’t that calculators exist, it’s that they’ve been demoted from luxury to disposable tool.
Context matters. Early calculators were expensive because they were essentially boutique computers: limited production, specialized components, immature manufacturing. Once microchips could be mass-produced with consistent quality, the cost of computation collapsed. Kilby’s quote captures that collapse in a way that feels almost morally charged: progress measured not in prestige or power, but in access.
There’s an understated warning, too. When computation becomes cheap, it becomes everywhere, and “everywhere” brings new dependencies and new inequities. Kilby frames it as a bargain; history shows it’s also a rearrangement of society.
The intent is partly pedagogical: take an abstract breakthrough in microelectronics and translate it into a household object everyone understands. Kilby doesn’t cite transistor density curves or fabrication yields; he cites a price tag. That’s shrewd rhetoric from a scientist speaking to a public that experiences innovation as affordability. The subtext is also a subtle claim of authorship. As a key figure in the integrated circuit’s early development, Kilby is pointing to downstream consequences that validate the original leap: the miracle isn’t that calculators exist, it’s that they’ve been demoted from luxury to disposable tool.
Context matters. Early calculators were expensive because they were essentially boutique computers: limited production, specialized components, immature manufacturing. Once microchips could be mass-produced with consistent quality, the cost of computation collapsed. Kilby’s quote captures that collapse in a way that feels almost morally charged: progress measured not in prestige or power, but in access.
There’s an understated warning, too. When computation becomes cheap, it becomes everywhere, and “everywhere” brings new dependencies and new inequities. Kilby frames it as a bargain; history shows it’s also a rearrangement of society.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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