I was just checking a claim that an area was more than a half a million square miles (it is) on my week-old Pixel 7 phone. An uncountable number of digits appeared for 400^2*pi in the scientific calculator.
I entered 1/7 and got a 60-digit repeating decimal answer.
Overkill, but facinating.
reminds me of the early 90s when we got a neat video card and a fpu macIIx and started plotting Mandelbrot sets, indeed, fascinating what math is doing behind the scenes....
It was the very early days of HP hand held calculators. A couple of fellow students had rich parents, so they had maybe HP45s or 65s. There was a stopwatch function. Those guys spent hours punching their buttons trying to record the shortest possible recorded time. Boys with toys.
I got my HP55 to show me 0.08 seconds after much practice.
I was well beyond the boy stage at the time.
JA, PLS, SoCal
I can get a 16 digit answer on my 1922 Monroe Model K calculating machine which is one more than Microsoft Excel. That's on multiplication, addition or subtraction.
Division and square roots rely on counting subtractions on the counter register which is only 8 digits.