A living museum of digital calculators — from early electronic hardware to vintage software. Each calculator is preserved as a faithful software artifact.
The Calculation Archive is a dark-mode museum interface housing period-accurate interactive calculator renders. From the Sharp QT-8D's analog photograph to the dithered EGA pixels of Windows 1.0, each entry is reconstructed with attention to the era's aesthetics — display technology, button layout, color palette, and typography.
Calculators are organised into categories (Early Electronic, LED Era, Graphing, Financial, Software) with a collapsible sidebar, detail panel, and a stage that keeps each calculator as the centrepiece.
| Calculator | Year | Category | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sharp QT-8D | 1969 | Early Electronic | First mass-market LSI calculator; rendered from photograph |
| TI-30 | 1976 | LED Era | Iconic red LED display; faithful button layout |
| HP-12C | 1981 | Financial | RPN logic; gold-on-dark palette |
| Casio fx-7000G | 1985 | Graphing | World's first graphing calculator |
| Windows 1.0 Calculator | 1985 | Software | EGA-era dithered reconstruction |
| Windows 3.1 Calculator | 1992 | Software | Full scientific mode layout |
git clone https://github.com/HumanElement-Dev/The-Calculation-Archive.git
cd The-Calculation-Archive
npm install
npm run devOpen http://localhost:5173.
- React 18 + TypeScript — component-per-calculator architecture
- Vite 5 — dev server and build tooling
- Pure inline styles — no CSS framework, no design system, full control per calculator
Every calculator here represents a moment when someone decided this is what computing should feel like in the hand. The archive treats each one as an artifact worth preserving — not just the logic, but the texture.
a human element idea
made with love by HumanElement and Claude