3 ms·
De mortibus and all that, but their prices for slide rules are pretty high. I bought an Aristo in good conditions for €10 last month.
by tgv 3y ago
De mortibus and all that, but their prices for slide rules are pretty high. I bought an Aristo in good conditions for €10 last month.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's true, but consider: there is a difference between someone selling a pile of stuff amongst which there happens to be an old slide rule versus someone specializing in slide rules. The device itself may be next to free but you're going to have to keep it in stock pretty much forever and working on the classical ones is going to be pretty time consuming. I'd see it as buying an item from a museum subsidizing the curator rather than as a purely commercial transaction. After all, even $10 is a lot of money for a piece of 30 year old plastic so there has to be something else that makes it tick. And slide rule collectors are a thing. If you just need one to use then $10 is fine, if you're looking for that one special issue with the weird scales then suddenly $200 may be acceptable, especially if you know it will sustain the world of slide rules for a couple of days longer. In dutch there is this word called 'gunnen' which I have not yet found a good English translation for, it denotes the act of allowing someone to have your business even if you know the price isn't as low as it could go because you like the person. This is a clear case of that concept.
- pimlottc 3y ago> De mortibus I had to look up when this meant, I think you mean "De /mortuis/ [nil nisi bonum]" [0]? You may have thinking of a different phrase [1]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_mortuis_nil_nisi_bonum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_mortuis_nil_nisi_bonum 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_mortibus_persecutorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_mortibus_persecutorum
- tgv 3y agoYou're right. I mixed up words (death, dead/deceased).