@bruces I really wanted to get one but then I saw the price. nope, I would rather spend that kind of money on another fountain pen or two and some interesting new ink :)
@bruces I first encountered these in William Gibson's _Pattern Recognition_. Amazing machines. There is apparently a project afoot to build new ones based on the original drawings; no idea how far along they are, or whether it's going to happen.
EDIT: The sign-up option on that page doesn't seem to work, so ...
@bruces Is it a pencil sharpener (I REMEMBER THOSE) or a hand grenade? I can't tell....
@bruces I have always wanted one. They have always been more costly than my want. So cool!
@bruces Much more reliable results than with artificial hallucinating parrots.
@bruces
In the Soviet Union the most famous mechanical calculator was Feliks M, named, of course, after Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was a copy of Swedish Odhner. Not a very reliable copy, at that; my mum was using one Feliks M. It was produced in big quantities until the end of the 1970s.
A friend has one. Operating it is extraordinary. The feel and sounds it makes are like nothing else. It's wonderfully otherworldly.
Of course the story behind them is breathtaking and appalling.
@tomjennings @bruces
I have a Type 1. It worked fine when I first got it, but shortly thereafter developed a fault. The add/subtract slider moves, but now it only subtracts. I'm not willing to open it myself; I'll have to find an expert to fix it.
I'm going to try 3D printing the published (mostly) plastic 3x scale working model. The model maker says it wouldn't work in plastic at 1:1, which isn't too surprising.
Wow nice! I imagine repair is 1) not easy and 2) expensive. But probably worth it, there's so few of them in the world.
@tomjennings
I'm pretty inept with mechanical things. Even if I can build the giant plastic one, and make it work, I won't try to repair a real Curta myself. It's widely reported that many new owners of Curta calculators, back in the day, took them apart out of curiosity, and were unable to reassemble them. I believe the factory had special jigs and tools.
@tomjennings
There are certainly some people in the community that have become experts at Curta repair, so someday I'll get it fixed.
There's mental paradigms in mechanical things that is far more varied than software, theoretical stuff that can seem impossible to understand. Modern digital stuff is shockingly all similar in approach, but complexity can become far vaster.
I love mechanical thought systems, theres so many I can't puzzle them out and they might as well be alien. Diversity of thought and approach to solution is greater than in code in my experience.
Code, it's all sort of one dexterity to deal with it all. Source is always text. Subtle mechanicals are another story. Zuses computers used lots of sliding flat strips to make decisions. WW2 aircraft gunnery computers are ",classic" analog techniques but intermixed mechanical and electrics
Curta, it's all peculiar to the inside of his head. The shapes are the affordances that build operations.
It's so much less corporate sameness.
There's so much beauty in the Long Tailed Pair circuit it's breathtaking.
The sameness of design today is so boring, even though the capabilities are so high.
I always prefer the beauty over industrial advantage. That's why my car are so old, the alien problem solving is often beautiful.
@tomjennings @brouhaha Indeed. But I thought I was the last person alive that knew what a long-tailed pair was. Lol.
Analog design in the 70s was challenging and fun. And satisfying. Today, everything is so easy because the hard engineering has already been done for you. That's really cool too but there's no elegance to it and there's little satisfaction.
@bruces I dearly wish I could.
@bruces I was down a weird Curta rabbit hole a short while ago. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the fedi is turning into an algorithmic* feed.
* Yes, I know that a chronological sort is technically an algorithm. You know what I meant.
Oh no, a math grenade!!! XD
@bruces "It will probably never wear out" is such passive low-confidence language we're not used from advertising of current time
lol
@bruces It's on my list
@bruces yeah these are a marvel. It's modern antikythera mechanism for future archeologists. Also who is a rallyist? Internet does not seem to know.