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Asoftware calculator is acalculator that has been implemented as acomputer program, rather than as a physical hardware device.
They are among the simplerinteractive software tools, and, as such, they provide operations for the user to select one at a time. They can be used to perform any process that consists of a sequence of steps each of which applies one of these operations, and have no purpose other than these processes, because the operations are the sole, or at least the primary, features of the calculator, rather than being secondary features that support other functionality that is not normally known simply as calculation.[1]
As acalculator, rather than acomputer, they usually have a small set of relatively simple operations, perform short processes that are not compute intensive and do not accept large amounts of input data or produce many results, though many software calculators can emulate handheldscientific calculator andgraphing calculator features such astrigonometric functions, approximations ofpi, and making plots of functions.
Software calculators are available for many differentplatforms, and they can be:
Modern computers first emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.[2] The software that they ran was naturally used to perform calculations, but it was specially designed for a substantial application that was not limited to simple calculations. For example, theLEO computer was designed to run business application software such aspayroll.
Software specifically to perform calculations as its main purpose was first written in the 1960s, and the first software package for general calculations to obtain widespread use was released in 1978.[3] This wasVisiCalc and it was called aninteractive visible calculator, but it was actually aspreadsheet, and these are now not normally known simply as calculators.
TheUnix version released in January 1979, V7 Unix, contained acommand-line accessible calculator.
Calculators have been usedsince ancient times and until the advent of software they were physical, hardware machines. The most recent hardware calculators are electronic hand-held devices with buttons for digits and operations, and a smalldisplay for inputs and results.
The first software calculators imitated these hardware calculators by implementing the same functionality with mouse-operated, rather than finger-operated, buttons. Such software calculators first emerged in the 1980s as part of the originalMacintosh operating system (System 1) and theWindows operating system (Windows 1.0).
Some software calculators directly simulate one of the hardware calculators, by presenting an image that looks like the calculator, and by providing the same functionality.
Asweb browsers became more powerful, developers focused more on creating online calculators rather than relying on local hardware. In May 2009,Wolfram Research announced the first public release ofWolframAlpha. Rather than acting like a typicalsearch engine, the tool was described as a "computational knowledge engine" designed to compute answers from curated mathematical research data rather than listing web pages.[4]
In 2011,Desmos was launched as a free browser-based graphic calculator at theTechCrunch Disrupt conference held inNew York City.[5] Founder Eli Luberoff developed the software as an alternative to hardware graphic calculators, noting that they were too expensive for most students.[6]
Every type of hardware calculator has been implemented in software, includingconversion,financial,graphing,programmable andscientific calculators.
Other numerical calculators that do not imitate traditional hardware calculators include:
Not all software-based calculators take numerical data or algebraic expressions as their input. Calculators can also take in arbitrary information ranging from lifestyle information to scientific notation. Some examples of these types of software calculators include:
There are also types of software used to help solve games that are sometimes referred to as calculators, including:
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There are many interactive software packages that provide user-accessible calculation features, but that are not normally calledcalculators, because the calculation features play only a supporting role rather than being an end in themselves. These include:
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