WOW! Its amazing how far afield this conversation has gone from garage floors
and lifts! But, I guess that is what happens when a bunch of old farts start
talking.
And, as one of those farts, the calculator/slide rule discussion reminds me of
something from my past. I was a freshman in college in 1970 (sorry, not
Purdue) and my father was an appliance distributor. One of his lines was
Remmington and they had one of the first electronic calculators on the market,
the "Lektronic". (http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/lektronic.html)
I am sure some of you will remember them. About the footprint of a current
computer keyboard, minus the numeric keys, with the old LED display; the kind
where the numbers were stacked one on top of each other. They orginally
retailed at $625 each (god, what is that in today's dollars?) and he got stuck
with a bunch of them when TI came out with the handlheld calculator a couple
of years later. So, he came up with a plan to get rid of them: I put on a
coat and tie and started hitting the office buildings near where we lived,
selling them for $125 each. I'd get $25 for every one I sold. It sounded
like a great plan, and I would have been able to sell a bunch except for one
thing: the damn caluclators didn't have a floating decimal point back then.
In fact, they didn't have decimal points at all. There was a little sliding
indicator on the display that you were supposed to move left or right to
indicate where your decimal was supposed to be.
There was a tremendous amount of interest in these (I carried a retail ad
shoing the $625 list price with me), but by 1972 no one wanted something
without a decimal point. I didn't sell a one.
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