I still have my trusty old Pickett. We wore them strapped to our hips like a Colt .45 and called our physics instructor "coach". We were macho geeks.
Pictured here next to its hi-tech replacement, the TI-11, which was a vast improvement. It did squares and square roots, not to mention the precision.
You mean you never worked out how to do powers and roots on a sliderule? <eg>
I can remember having to teach our Aussie maths master at school how to use logarithms (we were 14/15, and he was an exchange for the head of Chemistry!)
The first electronic hand held calculator I had was in 1973, I think. It was a Casio brand & had fluoro tubes & not LCD so battery consumption was shocking, but it did have an AC adapter, so using that certainly saved the batteries.
My first was one like this 5155 that I actually connected to BBS's back in the day. (still love playing D&D style games on BBS's today). This one was donated by a customer for our museum. A new power supply capacitor and memory and this little beauty fired right up and loaded my Lotus 123 5.5" floppy.
Nice 5155 you have there. Up until about a year ago I had 2 of those in my collection. I see you also have an IBM 5140 Convertible to the left in the picture, I had one of those as well.
I had quite a collection of early IBM computers but decided to give it all up and moved on to a different hobby because they were just taking up too much room to store. I had 2 5150 PCs, a 5160 XT, 2 5155 Portables, a 5140 Convertible, 2 4860 PCjrs, 1 5162 XT 286 and 2 5170 ATs. I also had a few other older computers like a Compaq Portable and a couple of early Tandy machines.
I indeed do have a 5140 up there. That one also works but I am looking for another hinge assembly. I have all this in our store / museum. Ibm 5155, the 5140, an Apple IIc, Apple IIe with color monitor (I play Donkey kong on that one). There are 2 Toshiba laptops with 95 on them that I play Leisure Suit Larry on. 2 more IBM's full towers with Win 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups that need memory. 2 iMac Colors one consumer 1 Edu that run os9 and OSX (yes it has had a memory and hard drive transplant :) and a few various parts pieces from 80 up. I need to come up with a better way to display this stuff so I can show it working.
I know it's a disease
Last edited by mohavepc; 27 Apr 2014 at 19:49. Reason: fat finger syndrom
I recently acquired the full User's Guide for Windows for Workgroups (3.11) - complete with COA sticker on the front! - one of the copyright dates in it surprised me.... July 1996! (well after the release of Win95)
I also acquired at the same time the manual for the basic Windows 3.1 - copyright date 1993
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