As much as I would have liked it to be true (it would have been a “jolly good jape” that folk in Malaysia and China could easily have pulled off and would be a welcome distraction from Angst over crashed aircraft, migration issues and terrorist risks (and the Japanese going extinct, there are not enough of them left to build calculators!)
it is a fake video made by a young man in the USA, experimenting with video effects. He fully admits this in the youtube comments and did not intend to mislead anyone; there are loads of young people wanting to make films similar to Dr Who or other British science fiction based TV of the 80s/90s.
It would only have been possible anyway on the dot matrix display based calculators that older teenagers and uni students use. It wouldn’t have done Canon’s brand image any good as its hard enough to get them to concentrate on their maths as it is.
it would also reduce sales to high profile govt departments and businesses for security reasons; they actually put new calculators in metal boxes which also contain radio scanners and light detectors to check the device is just a pocket calculator and not anything else that could be used to divert classified information.
You could play Tetris on one of those American calculators that contains an entire Z80 chip; but I’ve never seen these in Europe. Maybe because anyone who is smart enough to use them would build the Z80 computer anyway (it seems that between DK, DE and NL they have hoarded a stock of about 40 years worth of components).
Our generation (at least in England, the rest of Europe may have been more advanced) were lucky if we got a Westernised base 10 version of an abacus in the first primary school years! There were also these coloured rods/blocks ranging from a white one of 1 cm^2 to 10 cm^2
At age 7-10 in England you had to do the sums in your head; which makes sense otherwise the kids don’t learn the basics of numbers; calculators weren’t yet affordable enough to issue to every kid in school anyway.
Angel would have started school a couple of years later than me; she might have encountered the same base 10 abacus and coloured blocks (and maybe the Soviet dude who coded Tetris got the idea from them) but could even have had computers in her junior school (at least by age 9/10). Girls are often quicker learners than boys and tend to get more of the sums right; so she doesn’t need a calculator in later life as she can do most of the sums in her head..
