Old calculators

[mmcirvin]

Lest you think I only admire those old machines for their beauty, here's a link again to the Old Calculator Museum, which I mentioned some time ago. Most of these old calculators are astonishingly ugly devices, made at a low point in the history of industrial design, but I love them anyway, probably because they remind me of my childhood.

(The ahead-of-its-time Friden EC-130 had a sort of buttoned-down, mid-C20-technocratic beauty to it, though.)

Comments

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I think this is, or is very much like, the Heathkit calculator my college roommate had. One quirk was that the display would sometimes not come on, or at least would not come on right away, unless you held it under a bright light.

And if I recall correctly, he bought it circa 1973 for about $300.

A couple years later he was still using it while we were using our $125 HP-21s and the like, and someone asked him if he regretted paying $300 for a four-function, AC powered calculator. "Regret," he replied, "isn't the word."

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

And we had one of these in my high school. Aside from my Digi-Comp I it was the first machine I ever programmed on. The program I remember most fondly was one that made it play music -- well, rhythms, anyway, on the builtin printer. Whoever was paying for the printer paper must have adored me for that.