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I'm sure they would not have been less than £850 in whatever currency it was sold in back then, inflation adjusted. But the justification was much better than being a fidget toy.

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Oh definitely, prior to having cheap computers that can compute gigaflops, I would definitely have bought one to do number crunching.

The problem is that if I bought one now, it would simply be a toy and nothing else. That's just a bit more than I'm willing to spend.

Update it with USB so that it can take input and return results. Hook it up to a cash register for something like an antique store. Ideally one selling small items so that the customer can marvel at the display adding things up.

I also have always wanted one of those mechanical vintage cash registers, for the same reason I have always wanted a Curta. They always seemed like they would be fun to play with.

I could probably get one of those cash registers to play with for not a ton of money, but my house isn't huge and it's hard to justify the space.

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