Years ago, just about every visit to a thrift store yielded a new and interesting addition to my little museum of programmable calculators. Not anymore… the ones still missing are unsurprisingly the ones that are quite hard to find, and in any case, truly vintage calculators are becoming ever more scarce. (I suspect it has to do both with their age and the fact that far too many people discovered eBay.) So it came as a pleasant surprise that the other day (when I made a sad final visit to the veterinary hospital for Tarka’s remains) I found not one, but two vintage calculators in a thrift store along the way. True, they’re not programmables, just ordinary “four-bangers” but they’re certainly vintage alright: a somewhat unusual red LED Lloyd’s brand calculator and a first-generation “yellow LCD” model from Sharp.
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