I discovered that hitting something like C, CE and 0 simultaneously for some reason worked as an instant power off for my school calculator. Do calculators have such hidden off-buttons? Because I have discovered other calculators with other combinations.
There’s actually a neat reason for this! The way that simple keys work, like those in a calculator, is by connecting a circuit and letting a small amount of voltage through. This is usually fine because the keypad is broken up into different rollover zones, which is how multi-key input works. But if you find and press keys that are all in the same zone, their voltages add up and can actually overwhelm the little cpu in there. Really old calculators were really easy to break because designers never thought users would need to press keys like division, multiplication, subtract, add, square and square root all at once, which as you can imagine, caused a massive power spike.
Now, is any of this true? I have no idea dude, you’re calculator was probably fucking haunted or something. I’d have taken that thing to a seance with a ouija board immediately.
Not really, since keys work by shorting the circuit. That’s why pressing multiple keys at once on your keyboard doesn’t cause it to blow up. It would just assume the button with the shortest circuit was pressed, and ignore the rest.
It might cause weird things to happen with a mechanical or electromechanical calculator, since there were physical mechanisms engaged and disnegaged for each function, and might break/jam those, but not an electronic, and especially not a transistorised one.
It’s more likely that hitting them all confused the CPU, or dropped the voltage down enough that it reset, just in case something strange happened, or to try and fix any bug that might have caused it to register all the buttons being pressed.
I discovered that hitting something like C, CE and 0 simultaneously for some reason worked as an instant power off for my school calculator. Do calculators have such hidden off-buttons? Because I have discovered other calculators with other combinations.
There’s actually a neat reason for this! The way that simple keys work, like those in a calculator, is by connecting a circuit and letting a small amount of voltage through. This is usually fine because the keypad is broken up into different rollover zones, which is how multi-key input works. But if you find and press keys that are all in the same zone, their voltages add up and can actually overwhelm the little cpu in there. Really old calculators were really easy to break because designers never thought users would need to press keys like division, multiplication, subtract, add, square and square root all at once, which as you can imagine, caused a massive power spike.
Now, is any of this true? I have no idea dude, you’re calculator was probably fucking haunted or something. I’d have taken that thing to a seance with a ouija board immediately.
Not really, since keys work by shorting the circuit. That’s why pressing multiple keys at once on your keyboard doesn’t cause it to blow up. It would just assume the button with the shortest circuit was pressed, and ignore the rest.
It might cause weird things to happen with a mechanical or electromechanical calculator, since there were physical mechanisms engaged and disnegaged for each function, and might break/jam those, but not an electronic, and especially not a transistorised one.
It’s more likely that hitting them all confused the CPU, or dropped the voltage down enough that it reset, just in case something strange happened, or to try and fix any bug that might have caused it to register all the buttons being pressed.
I love that you bring a great technical and insightful answer and then just leave with that my calculator is probably posessed.