That's beautiful walkman archive, Casios really hold out well, most of mine are still working great, even the plastic binder cases are holding up.
I'm sure I had one like that many years ago, no idea what happened to it though! I did find this gem I bought from a car boot sale for about £3 if I remember right:
Wow that's very similar to the HP Graphing Calculator we were required to have in school, even the colors are the same, I'll have to find it.
I have no idea how to use it, the instruction manual is huge! I'd love to say I've got it to draw a fancy graph, but I have no idea where to start! I always wanted a graphics calculator when I was a kid so grabbed this when the opportunity arose
In a few classes we were taught how to use the graphing functions, the visual kind of balances out the drone of number crunching.
I had no idea Casio had a calculator PC, pretty cool from 1982, going head to head with Sharp/Tandy (Radio Shack). the FX-702P even has a docking station with a music function, too bad the article doesn't talk about that. These little computers were so nice with complex algebra equations, it was a great way to find if you answer was right, if it was wrong, back to the work. I used to like roll playing games, anybody remember Traveller? We'd program in the different dice and thought that was as good as it got.
Sharp and Casio were massive rivals always trying to outdo each other with the thinnest or most capable calculator / pocket computer etc. Of course Casio were also competing against the likes of Yamaha in the portable keyboard field and the Seiko group in the watch field, while Sharp tried to compete with Sony in the AV field, and at the time were well known for Microwave ovens back when they were a High-tech item costing hundreds of £s. At around this time Sharp were so big they were the Shirt Sponsor of Manchester United Soccer team, who at the time seemed to be the most famous soccer team in the world https://www.google.com/search?chann...SRUIHYivCCoQsAR6BAgGEAE&biw=805&bih=543&dpr=2 Back to Pocket Computers, it appeared that Radio Shack jumped ship from Sharp to Casio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer I suspect that the Casio Fx850P I showed in an earlier post was one of the last Basic Language pocket computers before they started to morph into PDAs then Smartphones made by companies outside of Japan. Casio seem to have retreated back to more basic products like school calculators. Still a big market. Every major supermarket in the UK sells them as they are considered as essential for school as pens and paper. I feel sorry for Sharp. They were an absolute pioneer in LCD displays. Back in the days of "Dual Scan" laptop displays (remember those, and the mouse trails that were needed so you could see the mouse pointer) I remember seeing a load of those on laptops in Dixons along with a Sharp laptop with a TFT display that was ten times better than any of the others. However, prices dropped so quickly they didn't recoup their investment and ended up being bought by Chinese company Foxconn.
I blame it on the logo, once Sharp updated it's branding it was all downhill. One of my neighbors worked for 3M in the early 2000's, he was talking about development of the Sharp Aquos TV they were working on, he said it would blow everything away. The high end flat screens held a lot of these companies together back then. I do have a Casio PDA around here somewhere, another oddity in the US with Palm and HP owning that market. Looking at hundreds of brochures and ads, it looks like Casio's Watch Business still chugged along with a huge selection, I wonder how that's doing now.
I have just started a new thread on Sharp http://www.stereo2go.com/forums/threads/interesting-sharp-website.4909/ At the weekend I was looking at a 2007 catalogue at my Mothers house. 32" LCD TVs were all around £900 back then. I knew someone who paid that for a Panasonic. By 2009 they had dropped to less than half that. Now a 32" TV probably costs less than the profit margin on them back when they came out.
The Calculator Wars, this looks like mid 80's? There's some really cool information on it, the growth of calculators in the 70's was similar to the growth of home computers in the 80's.
Here are my 3 Casios and a Commodore programmable. The Casio MG-880 on the right has the excellent 'Invaders' game along with melody mode. So popular in recent years that the have reissued it I think...
Rather than completely hijack the Crown thread or copy the photos from someone else's site have a look at the interior photos of this calculator http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_compet_22.html While it is true that within ten years desktop calculators were a almost empty box back then they had to be that big to fit all the electronics in. Something I discovered from the instructions for my early 1970s Sharp is that the ELSIMATE name came from Extra Large Scale Integration. With help from Rockwell they managed to get the dozens of ICs in the 1968 calculator down to four in the 1969 version. http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_qt-8d.html p.s. Do you know that the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004, was originally commissioned by Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom to use in one of their calculators.
Those are cool, I hope I haven't missed one at the thrifts not knowing what it was. I don't remember if I've mentioned it before but when I was a kid there was a small Burroughs Office Building on the way to the hobby store. Around August every year they got a large dumpster and threw away a ton of equipment, usually giant mechanical adding machines with a ton of micro-switches and LED lights. We'd pull off anything interesting for personal hobby projects.
Here's some in my office, I have a huge box in storage with tons more. Radio Shack TRS-80 (Sharp 1251), I paid a whopping .80 cents for this treasure. It uses square paper for data entry? There's either a template or plate in the upper cover. Texas Instruments TI-35, TI was extremely popular and great for basic math functions. This was close to $4 USD at the thrifts. Tele-Art DD120 Directory Dialer, remember these? You'd store your friends name and number and this would send a signal through a speaker on the back that would automatically dial your numbers. "Made in China," this would have been pretty rare in the USA prior to 1996.
The Sharp 1251 and it's accessories, these are so neat, very heavy with tons of buttons, what kid wouldn't love messing around with this. Printing was still relatively new, so printing anything out was an added cool factor. This one is near mint with all the cords, application software and docking station with microcassette recorder.
The 8 Bit Guy did a video all about the Tandy Pocket Computers, which were either rebadged Sharps or Casios The only thing different over here was that we did get some later model Casios in places like Argos and Dixons Looking back at the calculator site I posted it is amazing how much they shrank and advanced in just four years. Mobile phones did the same from between 1985 and 1990. Now there seems to be very little progress. Something I noted in the details of the Sharp was that Rockwell apparently had some problems when they moved from 1.5" to 2" wafers for IC production. Nowadays, 12" is the standard size as you can get many more chips on each one. The LED based Texas TI30 seemed to be the most popular calculator at college back in 1979. They were only about £10 new and did everything you needed for college work. Finally, here is an interesting Sharp I picked up for just £1.50 about thirty years ago. Unfortunately, since then the display has failed completely. There is someone on Etsy who actually got a batch of new LCDs made for the Sharp PC1251 as they are prone to doing the same thing, but despite being a similar size they are different. I have looked a few times trying to find out if anyone has ever successfully refilled an LCD but haven't ever found anything
A Soviet MK-61 programmable calculator. I got it when I was in 6th grade. It cost half of the monthly salary. It inherits to both TI and HP, taking from both and adding some extra functionality. It has RPC notation like some HP models. The exterior design also is reminiscent to 1970s HP calculators. Released almost 10 years later than the original models, it just exemplified how far Soviet electronics was behind. Although its predecessor was released in the early 1980s and had the same features, but was a tabletop model, not a handheld. You can see the third from the left decimal place does not work anymore. On the right is my smartphone with the emulator of this model - full, complete microcode from the original calculator along with some weird bugs and undocumented behavior that has been exploited to display crude "pictures" in games. To the left is my mixtape
Yet it only took them a couple of years or less to clone the very first Sharp LCD calculator. http://www.leningrad.su/museum/show_calc.php?n=26 Look closely and you will see that the ICs inside are different so it isn't just a rebadged Sharp. I don't know how high up in the Politburo you had to be to get one though.
