| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | My first calculator was a Rapidman 800, which sold for about $100 at Eaton's, | IIRC. <https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/items/show/28> Interesting vignette: <https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/items/show/28> I remember seeing the initial ad campaign. A big price drop from other calculators. But it only had 4 functions. I had been given a scientific calculator by then, if I remember correctly. Oddity: floating point but no scientific notation -- crazy. | BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high | school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later! | By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator. <https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1214517> Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction. Some fancy Pickets were supposedly made from magnesium to avoid this <https://utsic.utoronto.ca/wpm_instrument/pickett-ortho-phase-log-log-slide-rule-model-number-500/> I liked Sun Hemmi slide rules because they were made of bamboo. I still have one somewhere. Or maybe two. <http://www.sliderule.ca/hemmi.htm>