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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Author here if anyone has questions about old calculator chips...

@kens: Thanks, long time follower of your work. Are you familiar with the inner workings of the HP Voyager (11-C, 12-C, ..., 16-C) series, and if so, is a teardown/analysis of these something that you'd be wanting to do?

Sorry, I don't know anything about these calculators.

Great article and great job on the software!

Do you know if there's any of these calculators still around and available to purchase? I've always wanted to get my hands on a curta but One of these would be awesome too.

It looks like the Sinclair Scientific sells on eBay for about $45, but there aren't any for sale right now. The Curta, on the other hand, goes for over $1000, so not exactly an impulse purchase.

The price of Curtas seems to have gone up over the past 18 months. eBay has plenty of listings for Curta I and IIs, but you'd have to shell out more than US$1000 for one, unless the unit was in bad condition.

What first piqued my interest in them was a watch and clock show in my town. I remember really thinking they were marvelous engineering, but I also remember that number of $1000 as an average for a working one.

However it's kinda iffy buying one that you can't actually test first. It's been too long since I've purchased anything on eBay so I don't know what the return policies are.

The guy at the show mentioned "always test the _one_ slider. Those go first"

Edit- spelling

eBay leaves the return policies to the individual sellers, so some sellers absorb the cost of returns, some require you to pay postage, and some don't accept returns at all. Naturally some of this probably gets absorbed into the listing price.

No questions from me but definitely excited when I see righto articles come up here. It’s appreciated!!

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