Fred Abse wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:46:54 +0000, Joerg wrote:

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.

Most of the wooden Castells were reinforced, I think. The brass strips are
set in the wood, *across* the grain. 1950s vintage. Still dead flat, just
needs a dose of talc occasionally. Needed a new cursor around 1970.

I'll take some photos and post them.

-snip-

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.

The price of HP reflected the quality. I had a TI-58, a TI-59, and an
HP41C all at around the same time. The keyboard died on both TIs after a
few years (just after support ended woldn'tcha know?). I still use the
HP.


Mine kept up. But yes, HP felt more like Mercedes-Benz. However, just
like in daily life not everyone could afford a Mercedes-Benz.


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/