Text 1117, 54 rader
Skriven 2006-05-03 22:16:36 av DAVE SACERDOTE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av BURTON FORD
Ärende: Nerds 591
=================
B4d> I had one of the early Texas Instruments [in the '70s 
B4d> maybe?].....a DataChron. . .I had to send it in for 
B4d> repairs about ten years ago and they fixed it and
B4d> told me they had used the last repair part they had for 
B4d> it.... no more repairs.  I use it still, almost daily.

A DataChron!  Oooh.  IIRC, that came with a nifty folding carrying
case and had a built-in stopwatch, clock, and alarm.  Especially
useful for ergonomics and time studies.

[later]  I just did a scan on eBay for DataChrons.  Not too common,
I found, but not very expensive when they come up for sale. If yours
ever breaks again, you'll have no trouble affording a replacement.

= = 

My own first electronic calculator was a TI-30.  It cost me the
princely sum of $25.00 in 1976; sounds like a pittance today but
that was actually almost a week's takehome pay from my part-time
job.  

It was big and bulky, and had a denim carrying case with a belt
loop, and did a lot of cool "advanced" stuff, like sine, cosine,
tangents, and square roots, and even had a "pi" key (ooooh!).
It took a 9v battery which the circuits would suck dry every few
days with heavy use.  

The coolest, most excellent thing about the TI-30, though, was
the display.  Little tiny red LEDs which were so tiny they were
under little plastic domes which magnified them for viewing.
But that was not the coolest part, no not at all.  The coolest
part was when you had the calculator do something that required
lots of processing.  While the TI-30 was "thinking" about the
answer, the rightmost LED would "spin:" the outermost bars of
the character display would light up sequentially, making it
look like a dial turning round and round, until suddenly the
answer would appear!  TI actually gave us something to look
at while the calculator did all the work - very entertaining.
All my geek friends and I would ask the calculator for the 
square root of 365,234 just to watch that LED spin while the
TI-30 did the math, slowly, like it was counting on a million
tiny electronic fingers.  Awesome.

Ah.  Here, there's a museum of old calculators on the Web.
Check out the TI-30:  http://tinyurl.com/eudgy

Heh.  Thanks, Burt.  For a minute or two there, I was 16 again.



---
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, 
minutus carborata descendum pantorum
 * Origin: Try Our Web Based QWK: DOCSPLACE.ORG (1:123/140)