Collaborate Disseminate
At the start of the 1970s the pocket calculator was the last word in personal electronics, and consumers in Europe looked eagerly towards Japan or the USA for a glimpse …read more Continue reading The First European Pocket Calculator Came From Yugoslavia
If you like Nixie tubes and/or DIY calculators, checkout this interesting talk from the HP Handheld Conference in Orlando last month by [Eric Smith] from Brouhaha and [John Doran] from Time Fracture. …read more Continue reading Nixie Tube RPN Calculator Project
We’re now all used to near-limitless storage on flash and other semiconductor technologies, but there was a time when persistent storage was considerably less easy to achieve. A 1970s programmable …read more Continue reading Make Your Own 1970s Magnetic Stripe Cards
When a treasure of retrotechnology fails to work, the natural next step is to have a go at repairing it. [Adam Wilson] found himself in this position when he acquired …read more Continue reading Reviving A 1974 Sinclair Scientific Calculator
The early HP Reverse Polish Notation calculators have a special place in the hearts of engineers and tinkerers as there are lots of projects involving them. They haven’t been produced in decades, but [Chris Chung] has used some open source code to create DIY hardware version of the HP-41 Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculator.
The open source code behind the calculator is the Nonpareil High-Fidelity Calculator Simulator, and [Chris] has used it along with a custom designed readout and PCBs to create a working prototype. The simulator uses the original byte code of the HP-41 so the its behavior is …read more
Last month we touched upon the world of 1970s calculators with a teardown of a vintage Sinclair, and in the follow-up were sent an interesting link: a review of a classic Sinclair calculator kit from [John Boxall]. It’s a few years old now, from 2013, but since it passed us by at the time and there was clearly some interest in our recent teardown, it’s presented here for your interest.
It seems odd in 2017 that a calculator might be sold as a kit, but when you consider that in the early 1970s it would have represented an extremely expensive …read more
When writing a recent piece about Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN, as a hook for my writing I retrieved my Sinclair Scientific calculator from storage. This was an important model in the genesis of the scientific calculator, not for being either a trailblazer or even for being especially good, but for the interesting manner of its operation and that it was one of the first scientific calculators at an affordable price.
I bought the calculator in a 1980s rummage sale, bodged its broken battery clip to bring it to life, and had it on my bench for a few years. …read more
Continue reading Teardown With A Twist: 1975 Sinclair Scientific Calculator
