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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

When I was a child, I've had a Elektronika MK-61. [0] Not a graphing calculator, but it could be programmed. My father wrote some simple game for it (I think it was Bulls and Cows). I wanted to port Heroes of Might and Magic, not realizing that it's way too ambitious :-)

Here's an online emulator you can play around with: http://mk-61.moy.su/emulator.html

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61

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I bought one recently on eBay from a seller in Ukraine (despite the war, shipping is still up- from Kiev at least). I also bought its brother, an MK-52.

These calculators are interesting:

Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds.

Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts.

Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not allowed, you have to enter 0.5.

The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5 gives 2e-1

MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and EEPROM via some extra functions.

Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world) electronics fabrication system.

Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with the calculator.

To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys:

https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika...

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