The “of tomorrow” clause is a meme in itself. You might remember the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). EPCOT was later changed to Epcot so it wouldn’t mean anything, or so goes the story.
The House of Tomorrow is a movie, based on a book, about a youngster being groomed to save the world based on what some would call the “retro futurism” of Buckminster Fuller, who coined the term Spaceship Earth. That giant buckyball at Epcot is named Spaceship Earth, which seems fitting.
You’ll find, if you dig, a whole genre of retro futurism, which makes sense, as the year 2000 was pegged long before, in anticipation, as a kind of buoy or guidepost.
We would know, by the year 2000, what the future would hold. Would we be commuting to work wearing jet packs? Quaker Oats spoofed this vision in one of its breakfast cereal commercials. How about flying cars? What would the houses be like?
How smart would we be? Would nuclear energy be our primary energy source? Such questions haunted the 20th Century. I’ll get back to this thread.
The Calculator of Tomorrow plays off this “of tomorrow” meme, partly by accepting the calculator as already somewhat retro in flavor. The smartphone has calculator apps, however people still buy real calculators, for school.
The high school mathematics curriculum sometimes reluctantly allows calculators at least in higher grades, when we’re sure they’re not being used as a crutch, or something to that effect.
However, if you get to the college level and want to keep learning math, they want you to use a computer, especially for linear algebra which is all about multiplying matrices, finding determinants and so on.
The manual procedures are long and tedious, whereas entering a matrix into a calculator (if that’s even possible on a given model) is likewise rather impractical. Why use a cramped little calculator when the computer gives you Jupyter Notebooks and entire languages devoted to “operational mathematics”?
