[ale] OT: Woah, retro!

[Joe]

"James P. Kinney III" <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> writes:

> During a spouse unit mandated cleaning, I was required to get rid of my
> TI 99-4A card programmable calculator with the add on memory module and
> thermal printer unit and several plug-in program packs including
> statistics, statics and fluid flow engineering.

Are you sure it wasn't a TI-59? The 99-4A was a "real" computer (in
that it was programmable in BASIC and had a QUERTY kbd - I realize
that for some people here, "vacuum tubes" is the salient requirement
for "real computer"-ness, but that was slightly before my time :-) The
TI-58/59 was a programmable scientific calculator, similar in form
factor to all the TI SR-xy boxen, and had a card reader/writer (59
only), pluggable ROMs, and an optional thermal printer cradle. I
taught myself to program on one of those, and the lady that bought my
dad's survey business after he died *still* uses his TI-59 for co-go
computations.

Cheers,

-- Joe

> Her excuse to have me
> get rid of the lot was that the battery pack was dead and the charger
> wouldn't run it any more.
> 
> sigh
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 13:43, Joe wrote:
> > I got a package in the mail from my grandma today, containing assorted
> > junk of mine that she found floating around the house. It contained
> > the following items, among others, which I mention purely for the joy
> > of having them back in my posession:
> > 
> > - My Dad's Texas Instruments SR-50 scientific calculator, c. 1975. No
> > battery pack, no adapter, no manual. This machine was the central
> > computing engine at Dad's land-surveying business for about five
> > years in the 70's.
> > 
> > - My Timex/Sinclair 1000, c. 1982, Z80A, 1K RAM. With manual (!), but
> > no power supply, alas. Anybody got a dead one with a working power
> > supply they'd be willing to part with? I'd love to see if this thing
> > still boots. Hmm, maybe I can pick up a workable P/S at Radio Snack...
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > -- Joe Knapka
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
> CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
> http://www.localnetsolutions.com
> 
> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 

-- 
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me
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