The request is so vague as to be meaningless for all practical purposes. When I was an undergraduate we all used slide rules. The poorer students had to rely on 4-place log tables. In those days every calculation was an approximation.
In the early 1970's we had the four function calculator which gave us more significant digits, and in 1973 the HP-35 gave us an early portable scientific calculator. Transcendental functions then and now are commonly implemented using Chebyshev polynomials. They have the property that numerical errors are bounded and uniformly distributed over the interval of interest.
Not much has really changed since computers and calculators mask the fact that calculations are done with a finite number of bits and are thus still only approximations when dealing with real numbers.