On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:17:42 -0600 (CST) "Erik Hanson" <erik at ehanson.net> wrote: > I looked on ebay and there were two, one was going for ~1200 one for about > ~1500 so yeah, seems valuable. Well, I feel foolish now.. I was trying to buy a Curta for my collection about two years ago, but couldn't get one for under $850.. I guess I should have taken one of those. Dammit. The Curta is an interesting device, with a very unusual history. The machine was designed by an inmate of Auschwitz, while he was interned there. He did all the design in his head, and some scratchings on walls, etc. When the allies liberated the camps, he moved to Luxembourg (I believe..) and set up the Curta company to build the machines, using only the design that was in his head. Even in the 1950's, Curtas were very expensive, and only the well-to-do could afford them. Consequently, it's typical to find them in very good shape, complete, and in their little 2-piece screw top metal container. Last time I googled, there was information on operating the machine on one of the Curta enthusiast's websites. Another revolutionary mechanical calculating machine was the Felt Comptometer, designed and built by Torr (Thor) Eugene Felt. They were produced in decent numbers from the late 1800's until the mid-1950's, and looked like a shoebox with buttons on it. At the time, the Comptometer was the only real competiton to the famous Burroughs machine, which was a traditional crank-driven device - and quite beautiful to look at. The really interesting feature of the Comptometer, was that all of the works inside the device were driven directly from pushing the buttons alone.. there was no crank lever on the side, as with most all other mechanical adding machines. This made the Comptometer very fast to use, and allowed single-hand use - no need to keep pulling the crank to register the inputs. Quite a breakthrough, and it rightfully got a patent. God I love old crap. -L _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list