My mom was hired as a bookkeeper at the National Bank of Detroit (NBD) when she was 18 years old. That was the only job she ever had — over 40 years at the same institution, through every merger it went through along the way. NBD eventually became part of First Chicago NBD, then Bank One, and eventually, through Bank One's acquisition, part of JPMorgan Chase. She started as a teenager with an adding machine and finished her career at a company most people just know as Chase.
Before computers were common at the bank, she used a tape calculator — the kind with the paper roll that prints out a running total as you go. She could operate it by touch, without looking at the keys, the same way a fast typist doesn't look at a keyboard. She actually encouraged me to learn to type properly for exactly that reason — she'd seen firsthand, over decades, how much of a difference real fluency with a machine makes over just hunting and pecking.
One of the things she's genuinely proud of, and rarely gets asked about: she helped write some of the flowcharts used in developing the first ATMs. She never got credit for that work — which, for a woman working in banking technology in that era, was unfortunately not unusual. It's a real, concrete contribution to something that changed how an entire industry worked, and it deserves to be said out loud somewhere, even if it's just here.
She was at the bank when computers first arrived — meaning her career spans the actual transition this whole site is themed around: mechanical adding machines and paper tape, to electronic calculators, to full computer systems. She watched an entire industry's tools change under her, and adapted through all of it without ever changing employers.
Growing up, we had a lot of cheap solar calculators around the house — Texas Instruments among them. Small, unglamorous, always within reach. I don't think it's a coincidence that a website built around calculators traces back to a house where calculators were just always around, made normal by someone who used a far more serious version of one for a living.
One more honest detail, less flattering to me: when I was a kid, she'd sometimes just do my word math problems for me rather than walk me through them. I won't pretend that was some brilliant teaching method — it wasn't — but it's part of the real story, not just the polished version.
Our Basic Calculator is a long way from a tape machine, but the core idea — a tool that just gets the arithmetic right so you can focus on the actual problem — hasn't changed.
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