💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › floppysdomain › 1667683392.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 18:34:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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GEMINI VERSION
This will be the only page that significantly differs from the original. The original was pathetically short anyway, so I might as well put more attention into it here.
Let's start with one I never talk about, shall we?
This is a pretty cool scientific calculator. I would guess it is form the 1980's or 1990's. It can be powered by either a battery (and which one it is I still need to figure out) or the solar panel. It is not programmable as far as I know, but it looks like it has lots of features. There appears to be some statistics functions, in addition to the obvious scientific stuff. They keys are one huge rubber pad. It has that flexible plastic with the traces and contact points inside, but the way the keys are press and make contact is actually really interesting. They keys press down onto the "plastic circuit board" (let's call it that), but even though the circuit board is folded onto itself, the depression of the key does not make the two sides of the board contact each other. Instead, the circuit board is pressed into a conductive part on the inside BACK COVER, and that is how the key press is registered.
I got this one from a thrift store a few years ago. I do not remember the price, but I would be shocked if you told me I paid $2+ for this. Some segments of the LCD did not display, but I recently "fixed" it. That same plastic circuit board connects to a tiny chip, and then the chip connects to the LCD. I simply pressed down on the connection between the chip and the other parts of the calculator to kind of force it to connect again. In the right lighting, some segments still look like they are missing, but I think that is more due to the fact that it is running entirely on solar as I am writing this and looking at it, and the lighting is not the best. If I look at it from a slightly more normal viewing angle with good lighting, it looks fine. I would guess that if I put a battery inside of it, it would look fine even with the bad viewing angle.
Let me dig into my bag of calculators (it's actually a briefcase, but yes, I do have a briefcase that is full of nothing but calculators) and see what I will talk about next.
A few years ago, I saw online that this one has a special trick, so I bought one on eBay.
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Oh, you want to know its trick? It divides by zero! Without going itno a huge description of the calculator, I will just explain this division by zero. It basically tries to count to infinity, and you can watch it do so in real time!