ChairmanOfTheBored wrote:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:45:39 GMT, Joerg
wrote:

Fred Abse wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:00:51 +0000, Joerg wrote:

I think many of the German ones were melamine resin.
My Faber-Castell is wood, reinforced with brass strips.

Wow, must be an older one or some kind of luxury edition. It could be
worth quite some money by now.


I have one where the panels are Ivory veneer. Has a glass cursor pane.


That was outlawed much earlier in most of Europe because of what
poachers did to elephants. No ivory could cross the border.


Here's a reference that states they were obsoleted by a TI-30!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_r...d_linear_rules


Happened much earlier. I had (still have) the Texas SR-50. Very
expensive back then but my father was very generous one Christmas and
boy did that calculator make building RF stuff easier. Every serious
engineer had one over there in Europe. HP was kind of pricey back then
so TI was favored by most. So I grew up without RPN initially.


My first calculator was a commodore SR4148R. (great lil calculator!)

http://www.vintage-technology.info/p...re/co4148r.htm


Neat! I remember those. Do you still have it? Does it still run?


1 in mantissa, and 1 in both memories, it used .34 amps. All 8s in
mantissa and memories, it used .8 amps!


Ouch. The TI SR-50 is much less thirsty. Used the same three NiCd
batteries and it has once lasted non-stop through a grueling 4-hour exam
back at the university. Most others had to plug theirs in. I was
surprised the fire marshall never took a peek at all those stacked power
strips.

However, the TI has a little switcher in there so you could not listen
to the AM radio unless it was located at least 20ft away. Even then
you'd hear a faint meep ... meep ... meep when a calculation errored and
the LED array blinked.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/