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Vintage calculators are my hobby! It's a shame I only saw this thread when it's 12 hours old. If anyone has any questions about them or would like to see photos

Vintage calculators are my hobby! It's a shame I only saw this thread when it's 12 hours old. If anyone has any questions about them or would like to see photos I'm happy to share. The Twitter thread, while educational and cool, is a bit inaccurate/misleading about a handful of things. A lot of the photos are of later models or something unrelated to the tweet, and there were a lot more innovations not talked about. Progress also did not happen as early as the tweets would indicate. Personally, one thing I love about old calculators is the craftsmanship. Each one of the early ones was assembled by hand, and it shows - some of them are true works of art.

ndesaulniers 8y ago
Then you should post a blog or site to correct these mistakes and share your hobby with the world.
- opencl 8y ago
  There's already tons of sites about this stuff, probably hard to add much that hasn't already been written about at this point. I did a bit of collecting myself for a while but gave up when I both no longer needed calculators very much anymore and the prices started getting ridiculously inflated. http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_time-line.html http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_time-line.... - similar timeline but goes back farther http://rskey.org/ http://rskey.org/ - programmable calculators http://datamath.org/ http://datamath.org/ - TI calculators http://www.hpmuseum.org/ http://www.hpmuseum.org/ - HP calculators https://web.archive.org/web/20070528063100/http://www.taswegian.com:80/MOSCOW/soviet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070528063100/http://www.tasweg... - Soviet calculators, original site sadly went down http://thimet.de/CalcCollection/index.html http://thimet.de/CalcCollection/index.html - huge collection that includes accuracy and performance testing (for programmable models)
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  I wouldn't start a blog just to correct those mistakes, I think the twitter thread is cool and got people excited about vintage calculators which is great. The problem is just that I don't have enough time/energy to dedicate to making a site with substantial content about vintage calculators. A HN comment is orders of magnitude easier than making a proper site with photos, good content, researched details, etc.
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ndesaulniers 8y ago

Then you should post a blog or site to correct these mistakes and share your hobby with the world.

opencl 8y ago
There's already tons of sites about this stuff, probably hard to add much that hasn't already been written about at this point. I did a bit of collecting myself for a while but gave up when I both no longer needed calculators very much anymore and the prices started getting ridiculously inflated. http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_time-line.html http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_time-line.... - similar timeline but goes back farther http://rskey.org/ http://rskey.org/ - programmable calculators http://datamath.org/ http://datamath.org/ - TI calculators http://www.hpmuseum.org/ http://www.hpmuseum.org/ - HP calculators https://web.archive.org/web/20070528063100/http://www.taswegian.com:80/MOSCOW/soviet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070528063100/http://www.tasweg... - Soviet calculators, original site sadly went down http://thimet.de/CalcCollection/index.html http://thimet.de/CalcCollection/index.html - huge collection that includes accuracy and performance testing (for programmable models)
owenversteeg 8y ago
I wouldn't start a blog just to correct those mistakes, I think the twitter thread is cool and got people excited about vintage calculators which is great. The problem is just that I don't have enough time/energy to dedicate to making a site with substantial content about vintage calculators. A HN comment is orders of magnitude easier than making a proper site with photos, good content, researched details, etc.

deleted 8y ago

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