Sitting on a fortune
I was rooting through a drawer the other day looking for something.
It was one of those kitchen drawers where everything eventually collects. Old screws. Old Biros that no longer work. Dud batteries. You know those drawers as everyone seems to have one.
Anyhows, way at the back of it I found a calculator I didn’t even remember owning. Judging by a calendar that was stuck in the case, it dates back to ’93. What was very strange was that it still worked so the battery still has a kick to it. It’s a Sharp EL-373.
I know collectors are mad for old electronic devices for some reason, so I wondered what my Sharp might be worth.
I did a search on eBay and found a few for sale.
€9.00
Fuck! Never mind. There must be a lot of them out there.
My prize possession though is an original Sinclair Cambridge Mk I which is the first electronic calculator to hit the popular market. It’s in near perfect condition and is in its original case, complete with the instruction card that tells you how to add, subtract, multiply or divide. It was really cutting edge technology. That must be worth a fortune.
I did a search in the Interwebs.
€7.00
Double fuck!
It looks like I’ll have to hold onto them for another couple of hundred years.
They might be worth something then?
Leave those devices to the grandkids. By the time they retire hard telling what they may be worth. Possibly double or even triple in current market value.
“It looks like I’ll have to hold onto them for another couple of hundred years”
And they’ll probably still work in 200 years time!
Was that the Notation Polish Reverse one?
Nah! Live is complicated enough.
When I started working in quantity surveying, an electronic calculator was invaluable in having to deal with the millions of duodecimals in squaring and cubing etc, which formed the basis of the material quants in any building!
We had two desk-top calculators like this one, http://www.oldcomputers.arcula.co.uk/files/images/calc301.jpg and they each cost roughly the same as a Mini van back then!
They were easy to use and great fun if you wanted to press all the numbers in a certain configuration, which prompted some sort of count-down – or count-up, then go off for lunch and take bets on what the number would be when we got back!
Those were the days where you had to get management permission to invest in a calculator. Now anyone who has a mobile phone has one [and you can use it to make pahe calls, unlike the desktop ones…]