The Casio AL-1000 | Hacker News Reader

The Casio AL-1000

vintagecalculators.com

79 pointsturrini34 comments

Cool website. I sometimes miss searching for a topic and finding personal sites like this, with interesting content and to the point.

The ultimate one for this is:

http://oldcalculatormuseum.com/index.html

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

I saw this on HN yesterday I think (?). Not sure. But it attempts to do what you're looking for.

https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=calculator%20museum...

Try this search engine https://wiby.me/

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/

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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

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.

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.

>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...

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

Actually, the seventies :- )

For the record - I did remember the name correctly and it turns out (I should have realised) that these machines are properly remembered on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_FX-502P_series

One small highlight: Power consumption 0.0008W.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There isn't a method of calculating trig functions with less than 30 steps?

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

I considered buying a nixie tube clock recently.

Those nixie tubes aren't cheap!!

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.

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

Yes, for 1967.

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.

Googling the board number returns this page http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html

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

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.

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.

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... 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...

The internals were a lot more involved than I thought

We can see all bits in this calculator.

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