
The Casio AL-1000 - turrini
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/casio_al-1000.html
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santix
Cool website. I sometimes miss searching for a topic and finding personal
sites like this, with interesting content and to the point.

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newbear
Wow. You just brought me on a time machine. I had forgotten what search used
to be like. I would remember likeing the old Internet for its wierd brutalist
web design and anonymity but didn't think about how I found the wierd sites
using search. It would awesome if a search engine existed that only found
these niche sites and filtered out all the mumbojumbo. Don't know how it would
work, maybe train it with a dataset of sites? Someone with more Internet know
how should make this for us. Thanks

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louisrochal
Try this search engine [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

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knight17
Thanks for the Wiby link.

Million Short is a search engine that can remove popular websites from the
search results. You can set how many sites you want to filter out when
searching, for example, you can remove the top 100, 1000, 10k, 100k, or
million sites. I find that using it leads to reaching a different set of, less
commercial, low ranked sites that are usually hidden in Google search. This is
good for explorative searches and to find opinionated POV writing but not
always, sometimes you just get trash. YMMV.

[https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

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lisper
My Sharp EL-5813, which I first acquired in 1981 (I think) is still in my desk
drawer, and working fine. The most remarkable thing about this particular
gadget (aside from the fact that its still working at all) is that in 37 years
I have only had to replace the batteries twice.

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unnawut
Do you happen to remember how much you bought it for?

Just wondering if it was much more expensive (inflation-adjusted) than a
modern one. As there are claims that products these day are made less durable
in exchange for being more affordable/accessible.

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lisper
Sorry, I have no recollection of how much I paid. That was a long time ago.
It's definitely true that devices are ridiculously cheaper today. I paid
>$1000 in 1980 dollars for an Apple ][. Today you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero
for $5. I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have
an iPhone 4S that is still going strong. The real problem IMO is not that
things are less reliable, but that they're built to be disposable rather than
repairable and upgradeable.

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mschuster91
> I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have an
> iPhone 4S that is still going strong.

That depends on the price range. An iPhone 4s does not entirely consist of
glue whereas I have seen _lots_ of cheap Android phones without a single
screw. I hope no one ever begins to use heat plastic fusing like e.g. chargers
do...

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zbigboss
This was the first calculator I used in my job, at COMASP, 1970.

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mmjaa
This looks like such a delightful piece of hardware, I wonder if there would
be any interest in a faithful reproduction sold as a DIY kit? From my point of
view, this sort of technology should stick around, as a hobbyist computing
tool.

Roll my own core memory? Hell yeah I would. Work on a core memory assembler
(physical) for thingiverse? Also fine idea.

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billforsternz
I don't go this far back but I do have fond memories of the Casio Fx 501P (I
think that was the number) that I bought in 1980. I agonised long and hard
over the decision whether to go for that or the 502P (128 program steps versus
256 steps) but my poor student status made the decision for me. It was a
beautiful thing and much much cheaper than HP or TI competitors. I fondly
remember conceiving and implementing my first program, of any kind, on that
thing. It was a dominoes game, and the "AI" worked by maximising the standard
deviation (spread) of the tile values left in your hand to try and avoid being
left without a play. Standard deviation was one of the built in functions. Man
that was a lovely little machine.

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sundaysailor
>Man that was a lovely little machine.

Indeed. There even was a little dot matrix printer peripheral by Casio. It
printed on silvery rolls of aluminium-coated paper, I think by electrically
burning out dots from the coating. I did ASCII plots of function graphs on it.
And some love notes to my girlfriend. Fond memories...

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sundaysailor
Also I admire the engineers having developed the firmware for these machines
in the eighties under God knows what conditions. It was flawless.

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billforsternz
Actually, the seventies :- )

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userbinator
The bits of core memory are so big you can count them --- there's 448 in
total, arranged as an array of 28 x 16.

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zbigboss
Yes, but there were no trigonometric functions - it was difficult to use!

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hawktheslayer
That's when you pulled out your trusty slide-rule. I never used one but my EE
teachers always talked about them.

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rdtsc
My dad, a mechanical engineer passed his ruler to me. It was almost a mini
ceremony of sorts. It was special to him , but by that time nobody used them,
and aside for some playing with it a bit I never used it for anything else.

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stevekemp
A similar thing happened to me, as a teenager 25ish years ago - an elderly
relative gave me a slide-rule and told me it could be useful to me in my
physics career.

Part of me wishes I'd kept it, but even at the time I was given it the thing
was obsolete.

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ars
$900 in 1967 is equivalent to $6,776 today!! And this was considered "cheap"??

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aidenn0
3 years later the HP 35 came out for ~ $2300 in today's dollars, was pocket-
sized and had trigonometric functions.

[edit] In 1968 the HP 9100A (which was programmable and had trigonometric
functions) was $5000, or $35k today.

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stryk
That nixie tube driver board is incredibly sexy. I wonder what those black ...
block(?)-type chips are? The caption mentions they're 6-pin, but I can't make
out any markings on them.

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kalleboo
Googling the board number returns this page
[http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html)

> Blue and black devices are pulse transformers made by TDK, used to boost the
> core memory drive signals

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pjmlp
When I was in university, the calculator dream of many engineers was the Casio
FX-850P, I got the follow up model Casio FX-880P instead.

I wonder which model is now being favored in Portuguese universities.

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JohnStrange
I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of
all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a
slightly faster processor and a slightly more modern programming language with
structures and hash tables. There is even a guy in Germany who still makes PC
connection cables for them - although only as a hobby and he's booked out for
months in advance.

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AlbertoGP
The one guy I know about is actually from Spain, although he does sell
worldwide both through his own shop and through eBay:
[http://www.casio880.com/en/product/interface-cable-for-
calcu...](http://www.casio880.com/en/product/interface-cable-for-calculators-
casio-fx-880p-and-fx-850p/)
[https://www.ebay.de/usr/javitopo](https://www.ebay.de/usr/javitopo)

I'm still deciding whether to buy it from him or build my own following this
guide: [http://blog.damnsoft.org/rs232-ttl-adapter-for-vintage-fx-
ca...](http://blog.damnsoft.org/rs232-ttl-adapter-for-vintage-fx-casio-
calculators/)

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agumonkey
The internals were a lot more involved than I thought

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MisYogi
We can see all bits in this calculator.

