<VV> My Plans for Monday

[Tony Underwood]

At 08:50 AM 7/18/2009, Frank F Parker wrote:
> > That "slip stick" didn't require any batteries either.
> > I remember buying my first hand held calculator. It was the Texas
> > Instruments SR-10.
> > Rick
> >
>I still have my SR-10 and the ni-cads in it STILL WORK and take a charge.
>Talk about quality and the way things were made when quality was first
>in line.
>
>frank


Good grief, did EVERYBODY have one of these?

I got mine less than a week after getting out of the military and it 
went on and on and on... it got dropped and kicked around and 
brutalized and scuffed up and it just kept working, lost its charger 
and cobbled up another from wholesale supply house parts and it 
continued, kinda like my '60 Corvair, couldn't kill it.


Eventually the LED display began to fail, segments stopped working or 
would flicker on and off.    It got replaced with a used TI-30 I got 
at a flea market.   Used that one for years until ITS display started 
to lose segments whereupon I replaced it with a Sharp scientific 
nightmare thing that was an cast-off from the engineering department 
of the N&W railroad, after it had been submerged in muddy water 
(southeast shops were sloshed with a flood that left 3 feet of water 
in the place) for a day which dissolved the polarization coating off 
its LCD screen which meant that even after it was dried, cleaned, etc 
it came on but you couldn't see anything on the display.   It and a 
number of others like it were simply discarded, buddy who worked at 
the electronics shops picked up a couple of them from the trash and 
sneaked them out (the railroad didn't like it even if it was their 
trash you took home) and gave me one which I fixed simply by putting 
a piece of polarized clear mylar over the display, robbed off  a big 
sheet of the stuff I used for scrims that were for polarizing the 
lights for photographic copywork to eliminate glare from the subjects.

THAT one still works to this day and it's 30 years old now.   The 
batteries are three little #76 alky button cells... the ones in it 
have been there for about 7 years now.



It's also beginning to behave like a Corvair in not dying out...



tony..   bought a slipstick at a fleamarket not long ago for 2 bucks, 
astonishing quality piece.