Obtaining old calculators

[mtbc]

Recently, I stumbled upon an article about Commodore Business Machines' line of calculators. I have owned plenty of Commodore hardware, going back to the PETs that my secondary school retired, but no calculators. I was amused to read that, back in the 1970s, some calculators were marketed as being electronic slide rules. I still have my father's slide rules, he also had a desktop mechanical calculator and, later, one of the first version of the TI-30, with the red glowing digits that would show some thinking going on as it evaluated a trigonometric function.

I determined that I might enjoy occasionally using a decent ancient scientific calculator, ideally with a reverse-Polish interface. However, looking around online now, I don't see any particularly sweet spots in what one can buy of Commodore's calculators. I like how, say, the Commodore SR-4190R even has hyperbolic functions and probability distributions but it's not as if examples in good condition remain abundant and rarer models like the M55 appear indeed to be inconveniently rare.

Remembering mst3kmoxie's HP 12C, which can calculate some of the financial things that now form part of my day job, I explored the alternative of investigating the older HP and Novus range. However, things like the Novus 4510 don't seem to have existed in the UK and international shipping costs plenty. In dropping the nostalgia and taking a look at modern offerings, I discovered the SwissMicros DM15L which could be fun to play with. They seem to be out of stock right now but, worse, Parcelforce fees for importing one would mean it wasn't worth it.

So, the obstacles are broadly those of availability at all, or of getting the calculator from there to here. Ah well, it's more an idle fancy anyway rather than a pressing need. I seem to be in the wrong place and considerably the wrong time.

Comments

[lovelyangel]

It's hard to believe that anyone would need more than an HP-12C; it has a lot of functions. I have an HP-45, HP-10C, HP-11C, and one (maybe two) HP-12C. Plus I always use PCalc in RPN mode. I think it's amazing that the HP-12C is still sold new after decades in production.

[mtbc]

That sounds like a nice collection!