Pocket Calculator Show classic nerd electronic toys

November 14, 2002 8:46 PM

Pocket Calclulator Show looks like it started as a sideline of a shortwave radio show about "products from the electronics revolution of the 1970s and 1980s", but its of primary interest for their collections of classic nerd toys. Thrill to the memories in the Digital Watch Museum, the Walkman Museum, the Boombox Museum, and especially the collection of Magical Gadgets, which includes a not-so-useful-anymore cb radio to 8-track adapter, an incredible casio talking clock/calculator (listen to it talk!), and, of course, that great pioneer of personal sound technology - the Bone Fone (it vibrates, you know!)
posted by yhbc (7 comments total)

Full disclosure - I found this site on a quick google for a Bone Fone reference to throw into the headphones thread as a semi-gag. Matt deleted my comment there, but since my comment was "Now these headphones - they vibrate!", I can sorta see why it got the axe. However, it did get a response in the thread (which now doesn't make much sense), and the rest of the site was pretty neat, so I made a whole post out of it.

Besides, I think my dad had one of these in the family van (this was before mini-vans, people!)
posted by yhbc at 8:48 PM on November 14, 2002

I was very close to buying one of these in high school. It was portable and I had cassette tapes coming out of every drawer at the time.
posted by eyeballkid at 8:52 PM on November 14, 2002

Here's a horny little online calculator to add to your impressive collection, yhbc. ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:56 PM on November 14, 2002

I recall my first consumer purchases, using my own hard-earned paper route cash, sometime in the mid 60s. My Dad had said "It's your money, you earned it and you can do whatever you want with it". I imagine he also said something about saving as well but that didn't seem important at the time. I came home with a transistor radio, a sweatshirt with the very risque (to a 13 year-old) Playboy rabbit logo and a copy of Mad magazine.
posted by islander at 9:13 PM on November 14, 2002

I was about 14, so this is maybe 1977, and my dad gets his very first electronic calculator with LED readout. (He'd been using a print-spool calculator for a while that made a satisfying chugga-chugga sound with every entry; before that he'd actually used a 19th century mechanical adding machine with a foot-long slot-machine-style arm, a borrowed item from the historical society he ran.) Anyway, I loved the red glow-in-the-dark LEDs on the new one. I wrote a short sf story about a bunch of these electronic calculators that found a way to communicate with each other through the electrical lines, and this was way before anybody knew anythng about the internet, BBSes, or even IP over electric. The main problem, as I recall, was figuring out what they could DO once they all banded together, besides offer up bogus calculation results.
posted by dhartung at 11:14 PM on November 14, 2002

I (heart) my HP-67.
posted by alumshubby at 3:54 AM on November 15, 2002

I posted earlier!?

In Jr High several students showed up with, MJ Beat it watch. They never heard the last of it. Thanks for refreshing some memories.

The post was very well rounded, even had funny audio.
posted by thomcatspike at 4:45 PM on November 15, 2002