[kps]

“Almost everyone, even a long time ago, had handheld calculators at their disposal.”

Can't pipe the input and output of a handheld calculator.

“The only date I could find in the man pages is 2006”

`bc` was in 6th edition Unix, so 1974 or 1975.

[ajford]

I strongly feel like this author hasn't written a shell script in a while... Maybe ever?