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The Casio AL-1000

vintagecalculators.com

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Re: The Casio AL-1000

#21

Post by stevekemp »

rdtsc wrote: post #9
hawktheslayer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's when you pulled out your trusty slide-rule. I never used one but my EE teachers always talked about them.

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.

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#22

Post by JohnStrange »

pjmlp wrote: post #20

When I was in university, the calculator dream of many engineers was the Casio FX-850P, I got the follow up model Casio FX-880P instead. I wonder which model is now being favored in Portuguese universities.

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.

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#23

Post by billforsternz »

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.

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#24

Post by sundaysailor »

billforsternz wrote: post #23

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 fi…

>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...

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#25

Post by sundaysailor »

sundaysailor wrote: post #24
billforsternz wrote: post #23

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 fi…

>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...

Also I admire the engineers having developed the firmware for these machines in the eighties under God knows what conditions. It was flawless.

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#26

Post by mschuster91 »

lisper wrote: post #18
unnawut wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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...

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#27

Post by kalleboo »

stryk wrote: post #13

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.

Googling the board number returns this page http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html

> Blue and black devices are pulse transformers made by TDK, used to boost the core memory drive signals

Re: The Casio AL-1000

#29

Post by louisrochal »

newbear wrote: post #16
santix wrote: post #7

Cool website. I sometimes miss searching for a topic and finding personal sites like this, with interesting content and to the point.

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…

Try this search engine https://wiby.me/
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