The price of technology
 

So now at age 97, Dad the Civil/Structural P.E. has finally decided to retire and tasked me with closing down the office of more than 50 years. The things that you find while manning the shredder, some you'd rather keep and frame than shred.

So I ask him about this invoice. He tells me that Mr. May and his boys kept visiting his office trying to sell him a calculator. He told them at the time he didn't have the money to purchase the calculator, but they persisted in selling him one anyway. So finally they drop the calculator off with him to try for a couple of weeks. When they return he tells them it is a nice piece of equipment, but I just can't afford it......however........ I do have a really nice little car outside in the parking lot and......well the rest is history!



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I bet that calculator is worth way more than that Fiat now!

That is awesome, I would hold onto it as a fun conversation piece

Seems Legit

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I was on a 4WD mailing list back in the '90s and a guy traded a fully running Jeep for a 1 Gb external hard drive. :eek:

I was in high school about then. We had just moved to Montgomery, Alabama. The school was built in 1929 and not modernized much at all. I took a class in business machines hoping it might have computers or some electronic machines. Nope, it was all 100% marvels of mechanics. Just all sorts of outdated mechanical adding machines. Well we did have a punch card reader! They were trying to convince me that punch cards were going to be here forever. I asked my teacher if she had ever heard of magnetic tape and she just got mad. We did not even have an electric typewriter, just mechanical versions.

Of course we had no AC or elevators either. Three stories and stairs all the way. And the boys could smoke on campus in the bathrooms. Gag. The smoke was horrible.

Yea, keep that receipt. It is pretty cool.

He told me it was a 4 door sedan, not a 124 spider. So probably like this one:


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I was in High school from 1979-1983. The TI-30 came out a couple of years before. My class was the first not to be taught to use sliderules.

Physics lab still had an old desktop - 50 lb! - calculator, chained up! Each digit was made up of 10 individual filaments.

As far as computers, the high school had a PR1ME 300 main-frame with core memory. I've forgotten how much memory (32KB or 48KB). It was 16bit, and was probably installed around 1974/75. I started using it around 1976. It came with 3MB if disk space. It eventually had 18MB additional storage and we were able to get it to 32 (well, 31) users. I've forgotten how many modems we had connected, probably 8.

Pretty amazingly advanced for the time.

That WT May invoice caught my attention as I just tossed about 10 years worth of those invoices from my Dad's business.

It seems your dad and my dad worked about 1.5 blocks from each other at that time. We owned Strauss-Stallings Jewelers at 242 E. Capitol St and bought lots of office equipment & supplies from WT May, including a 4 function nixie tube calculator for a more reasonable $300-ish. He died in December 2013 and I've been going through decades of old business records for the past 2 years, shredding or tossing as appropriate. We'd probably still have that calculator (and a lot more stuff to go through) if the building hadn't burned in 1983.

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Remember watch the company accountant going thru a shelf with several old calculater/adding machines. He was still depreciating them even though the company didn't use them any more.

dang...shake your dad's hand for me. congrats to him!!

i am 50-something years behind him. i am 99% sure i am not working to 97. pretty sure at 97 i wouldnt remember a Fiat or a calculator.

I graduated in 1983, a buddy graduated a year before me and went college for computers and was taught punch card the 1st years........they switched in 84 which sucked for him.

First 1 gb HD I bought, $3,000.00

Thankfully it was a company expense.

You had a calculator? We used our fingers and toes...

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This is a receipt I found for my first custom built "mega computer". This replaced my 4.77 MHz PC with just one meg or RAM and a 32 MB hard drive.

That new 2400 baud modem was a big improvement from the 300 baud modem I was using. Look at the price of the RAM. 4 megabytes (not Gigabytes) of RAM was just $449. :eek:

BS! you still had feet? we could only count to twelve. 10 toes, two ankle nubs.

And in your case you could count to 24:D

97 is a run for the ages.

The money I paid for personal computer hardware in the late 80' thought the 90's could have bought Fiat: Not the car, the factory.

The last "big bridge" built in 2009 when he was a mere 89 years old. Mississippi Highway 44 over the Pearl River in Southwest MS. 5100 feet of bridge over a railroad and the river. Coincidentally, the steel girders were fabricated in Morgantown KY and trucked to the job site which is in the Morgantown community of MS. Dad was always aggravated to find someone had added graffiti to his bridges. So on this one, the last of the "big bridges", I gave him a marker and told him he was going to be the first to put HIS name on it!


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Nowadays he's chillin' out and relaxing yet still consults with other Engineers and Contractors when the need arises.



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fridin calculator at my first paycheck job
the thing was stone mechanical except for the motor
it shook and walked across the desk when doing division
later I got a electronic one in about 1972
but never knew they were that much

had built a P-1-100 with scsi drive about 3k plus 500 for small color monitor in about 1990