I was recently interviewed by a Hungarian podcaster, mostly about my participation in the early days of game development in Hungary, but also about my more recent work, including my scientific contributions.
I just listened to the interview and thankfully, I didn’t say anything colossally stupid.
It was less than 24 hours ago that I wrote about the death of a friend and now I have to do it again: I just learned that Palmer Hanson died a few days ago, after a prolonged illness.
Palmer’s name was well known to the calculator enthusiast community ever since the days of the friendly rivalry between owners of high-end Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard calculators in the late 1970s. Palmer was famous, among other things, for writing one of the fastest calendar printing programs for the TI-59 calculator. Though I never met Palmer in person, over the past decade and a half I corresponded with him many times, on account of my Web site dedicated to programmable calculators, rskey.org, and the archival material that I publish there.
It was only a few weeks ago that I received an unexpected parcel from Palmer, with a batch of rare newsletters that he sent to me for scanning and Web publication. I gladly complied. Another batch of newsletters followed shortly thereafter; this batch is still sitting on my desk, as I’ve been busy with work lately and have not had the time to do the scanning.
Therefore, I knew that Palmer was gravely ill, but I was nonetheless hoping that he would stay with us for a little while longer. Unfortunately, when our time comes there is not much we can do, and Palmer’s time came after a long and, I sincerely hope, happy life.
Googling his name just now, I came across a video of a presentation he gave less than two years ago, at HHC2012:
Good-bye, Palmer. I feel privileged to have known you, even if it was just online.
Last month, I was on a calculator buying binge. Well… not really, but I did find two rare programmable Casio calculators on eBay, the second of which, a Casio FC-200, just arrived all the way from France.
For the first time in years, I was able to add a truly new (to me) programmable calculator to my Web museum: the Casio FM-300. What a delightful find!
I spent some of my time today building a calculator.
I still know how to handle a soldering iron, but this time around, the design is not of my own. The credit goes to Michael Berger, a calculator enthusiast in Germany who decided to resurrect a classic East German desktop calculator, the Robotron K-1003 in the form of a microcontroller-based kit.
And thanks to Michael, I had some pre-Christmas fun. But now that the calculator is up and running, I feel compelled to find its original German-language manuals and understand its programming model.
It’s rare these days that I add a new calculator, even a not particularly exciting non-programmable model, to my “museum“, but the other day, I did find an old Sharp 4-function calculator that was previously unknown to me in a thrift store: The Sharp EL-102M.
It’s not every day that I can actually add some new information, however trivial, to the “interwebs”. But today, I received a question from a calculator enthusiast. He wanted to know the meaning of a mysterious “BM” or “BN” logo that he found on the back of a vintage Sharp pocket computer:
I have seen this symbol many times before. I thought I knew what it meant but suddenly, I was stumped. What was it? A standards organization? A quality logo? Something else? Google was of no help either; I was searching high and low but couldn’t find anything even remotely resembling this strange sign.
Then I looked at my collection of scanned calculator manuals and sure enough, on the cover of a vintage Casio manual, I found it. Same logo. It even had some text next to it, but it was not legible. So I started searching my library of paper manuals.
Much to my disappointment, while the logo was present on a few of them, it was not much more legible than the one on the scanned copy. Eventually, I came across a manual that contained a semi-legible version:
So this is it. The logo reads, in case the above is not sufficiently legible:
Mystery solved. And while I nave no clue as to why information about this once prevalent logo is not readily available online, I can confirm that searching with the above full phrases on Google reveals nothing relevant (with one exception; searching for the strings “BM MARK FOR” and “HIGH QUALITY” yields one relevant hit, a scanned PDF copy of the Canon Palmtronic F-7 manual from the Web site of Katherine Wasserman). Well, I guess that is going to change now.
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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I just added some new calculators to my ever growing online museum. Two of them are programmables: an Aurora SC-180 and a Casio FX-770P. I also added several non-programmables to the “photo album“: a Btech fx-82LB scientific model (obviously, a Casio clone), a Canon P3-DII, a Cedar CD-420, a Corvus 322 (this is a real vintage machine), a Lloyd’s Accumatic 310 (similar to my first ever calculator), a Sharp EL-531RH, and an Underwood 340 (this is a really ancient machine, printer only, no display). I also added two calculator-like non-calculators: an “RV Special” databank and a handheld Sudoku game.
Here’s another fine example of a somewhat Orwellian interpretation of Draconian copyright laws: according to Texas Instruments, hacking your own pocket calculator is illegal.
Recently a friend of mine, responding on the bureaucratic nightmare surrounding the H1N1 flu shots, remarked that “it’s enough to turn one into a Republican”. What can I say? Acts like those of Texas Instruments are, on the other hand, enough to turn one into a commie. After all, when corporations treat their own customers as the #1 enemy, what is the customer to think?
