Wow. You just brought me on a time machine. I had forgotten what search used to be like. I would remember likeing the old Internet for its wierd brutalist web design and anonymity but didn't think about how I found the wierd sites using search.
It would awesome if a search engine existed that only found these niche sites and filtered out all the mumbojumbo. Don't know how it would work, maybe train it with a dataset of sites? Someone with more Internet know how should make this for us. Thanks
Million Short is a search engine that can remove popular websites from the search results. You can set how many sites you want to filter out when searching, for example, you can remove the top 100, 1000, 10k, 100k, or million sites. I find that using it leads to reaching a different set of, less commercial, low ranked sites that are usually hidden in Google search. This is good for explorative searches and to find opinionated POV writing but not always, sometimes you just get trash. YMMV.
My Sharp EL-5813, which I first acquired in 1981 (I think) is still in my desk drawer, and working fine. The most remarkable thing about this particular gadget (aside from the fact that its still working at all) is that in 37 years I have only had to replace the batteries twice.
Do you happen to remember how much you bought it for?
Just wondering if it was much more expensive (inflation-adjusted) than a modern one. As there are claims that products these day are made less durable in exchange for being more affordable/accessible.
Sorry, I have no recollection of how much I paid. That was a long time ago. It's definitely true that devices are ridiculously cheaper today. I paid >$1000 in 1980 dollars for an Apple ][. Today you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5. I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have an iPhone 4S that is still going strong. The real problem IMO is not that things are less reliable, but that they're built to be disposable rather than repairable and upgradeable.
> I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have an iPhone 4S that is still going strong.
That depends on the price range. An iPhone 4s does not entirely consist of glue whereas I have seen lots of cheap Android phones without a single screw. I hope no one ever begins to use heat plastic fusing like e.g. chargers do...
This looks like such a delightful piece of hardware, I wonder if there would be any interest in a faithful reproduction sold as a DIY kit? From my point of view, this sort of technology should stick around, as a hobbyist computing tool.
Roll my own core memory? Hell yeah I would. Work on a core memory assembler (physical) for thingiverse? Also fine idea.
I don't go this far back but I do have fond memories of the Casio Fx 501P (I think that was the number) that I bought in 1980. I agonised long and hard over the decision whether to go for that or the 502P (128 program steps versus 256 steps) but my poor student status made the decision for me. It was a beautiful thing and much much cheaper than HP or TI competitors. I fondly remember conceiving and implementing my first program, of any kind, on that thing. It was a dominoes game, and the "AI" worked by maximising the standard deviation (spread) of the tile values left in your hand to try and avoid being left without a play. Standard deviation was one of the built in functions. Man that was a lovely little machine.
Indeed. There even was a little dot matrix printer peripheral by Casio. It printed on silvery rolls of aluminium-coated paper, I think by electrically burning out dots from the coating. I did ASCII plots of function graphs on it. And some love notes to my girlfriend. Fond memories...
For the record - I did remember the name correctly and it turns out (I should have realised) that these machines are properly remembered on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
My dad, a mechanical engineer passed his ruler to me. It was almost a mini ceremony of sorts. It was special to him , but by that time nobody used them, and aside for some playing with it a bit I never used it for anything else.
A similar thing happened to me, as a teenager 25ish years ago - an elderly relative gave me a slide-rule and told me it could be useful to me in my physics career.
Part of me wishes I'd kept it, but even at the time I was given it the thing was obsolete.
That nixie tube driver board is incredibly sexy. I wonder what those black ... block(?)-type chips are? The caption mentions they're 6-pin, but I can't make out any markings on them.
I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a slightly faster processor and a slightly more modern programming language with structures and hash tables. There is even a guy in Germany who still makes PC connection cables for them - although only as a hobby and he's booked out for months in advance.
