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My mother just got a free calculator, actually two, because she shopped at the right store at the right time and qualified for the free gift ... one of the pair, which I ended up with is a "scientific calculator." It was given to me because of the word "scientific" appearing on the cover, along with it having a number of mysterious keys labelled "sin" and "cos" and "tan" that my mother has no understanding of or use for. The buttons are too small, and the display too tiny for her elderly eyes, and so it ends up in my hands. At least she has not sunk so deeply into her burgeoning senility that she wrapped it and tried to pass it off as a present. She's very fair-minded when it comes to Christmas presents. Her siblings reached a stage where they would do all their shopping at the dollar store, and the Christmas Cards from Aunt Sarah, who never quite understood inflaction, that contained $2 were a longstanding family joke.
Anyway, as I held this device for the first time I was transported backward in time, reminiscing about my first Texas Instruments TI 30, which had the same mysterious buttons, and cost a lot of money, in 1978 dollars. I think it was around $40? Anybody remember? I got the deluxe package, with the simulated denim zip case and the book that taught you to do biorhythms. My first actual calculator was a Commodore, which didn't have floating point decimals. It operated just like a mechanical adding machine.
As much as I like calculators, though ... I'm hard pressed to name a favorite piece of technology ... the computer, the stereo, the television, the game systems ... if I would have to pick one and forsake all others, it would be the computer. Or maybe the car.
How technological did you mean? I mean, damn near everything I have has some technological aspect to it, including my ball point pens ...
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