The humble calculator has now been a fairly common part of every office for many years now and it shows no sign of ever going away.
Even though we have computers capable of running through thousands of calculations a second, the fact that you can pick up a small piece of plastic and bang in a few numbers to get an answer seems to be a real convenience.
Even stranger, I've seen many people use a calculator to check the results of an Excel spreadsheet! Now, years ago I remember a bug in Excel that meant that there were some errors in calculations, but seriously, who distrusts their work *that* much?! Anyway, it seems that what we want above anything else, including neat technology and expense is convenience.
When something is convenient it becomes well-used and this is why the calculator with its sometimes comedy-sized buttons and over-large displays works so well.
The cost of them is ridiculous when you consider that what you hold in your hands is probably fifty times the computing power that took man to the moon.
You can pick up calculators for pennies and they all do the same job - they add stuff up.
The reason they are so cheap is really down the fact that adding stuff up is the one thing that computers to extremely well.
In fact, it's pretty much all they do.
A modern computer is just a fancy box adding stuff up extremely quickly.
So, will the dominance of the calculator stick around? I personally think it will.
The calculator is an endearing thing.
It can be stylish or utility but it will always to its job well and without fault.
You can also get personalised ones, scientific ones and some that have screens that allow you to graph things, but at the end of the day, they are just doing what they do so well - they add things up.