"You might be surprised to learn that the calculator chip cannot perform multiplication natively. There's no floating point unit to multiply two numbers."
Nowadays the silicon real-estate cost for floating point math is trivial, and chip area is filled out with RAM cache for lack of anything better to do ...
Quite true. The sexy multiplier chips from TRW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc. ) were still a few years off, and not intended for mere calculators. Same for the Intel x87 floating point co-processors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8087).
Nowadays the silicon real-estate cost for floating point math is trivial, and chip area is filled out with RAM cache for lack of anything better to do ...