I was completely distracted by the magazine cover. The calculator being advertised there, and the wording, caught my attention.
The magazine issued is available here [0].
Apparently, it really was wiring up an entire calculator.
> ... Start assembly by installing and soldering into place the fixed resistors. Then proceed to installing the three electrolytic capacitors, the diodes, and the transistors, taking care to observe proper polarity and basing. Mount the transistors close to the board’s surface...
Until microcomputer boom of the 70's and 80's there was the calculator boom of the early 70's. The availability of the microprocessor made small calculators widely available for the first time and they were very popular among the type of people that probably would've read Hacker News had it existed.
What caught my eye was the headline about CCDs as successors to video camera tubes. Charge-coupled devices being, of course, the sensor technology now used by essentially all of the billions of digital cameras on the planet.
They see a plenty of use in professional and scientific contexts, so it’s not like their life is over. Indeed the largest digital camera sensor ever, the 3.2 gigapixel imager installed in the soon-to-be-online Vera Rubin Observatory, is CCD. CMOS won out in consumer products because of lower cost and power consumption.
The magazine issued is available here [0].
Apparently, it really was wiring up an entire calculator.
> ... Start assembly by installing and soldering into place the fixed resistors. Then proceed to installing the three electrolytic capacitors, the diodes, and the transistors, taking care to observe proper polarity and basing. Mount the transistors close to the board’s surface...
[0] https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics