Yesterday I found this in the attic:
It’s my calculator from high school! This was purchased in 1988 and I used it throughout year 11 and 12 and into university. It’s not a good calculator by todays standards, but in 1988 it was high-end and not only was it very useful for my schoolwork but I also used it a lot for schoolyard gambling via the inbuilt random number function.
As you can see I vandalized decorated it quite a bit!
In addition to ‘Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds‘ scratched under the display (and made more visible by adding crayon) it also has ‘The Mission‘ on the top…
And ‘Phobia‘ (a Nephilim song) on the side.
On the back we see ‘Nephilim‘, an R-rating sticker (from a VHS or magazine), a band name written using letter stickers and my own name (which I blacked out) followed by ‘T32‘ for Tutor Group 32, my high school class.
Apparently only one instance of ‘The Sisters of Mercy‘ on the back was insufficient since I also carved it at the bottom, and then covered that with two wonderfully retro stickers from my then-favourite record store!
Perhaps most delightful is the graffiti around the keys. It’s difficult to photograph because the ink has mostly faded, but I’ve circled all I could find. They are: ‘Jesus Loves The Sisters‘ (yellow), ‘Burn‘ (a song reference, purple), ‘Fields Of The Nephilim‘ (green), ‘Jesus‘ (white), ‘Depeche‘ (above the ‘mode’ button, blue), ‘SMC [heart] Bob‘ (in Sue’s handwriting, red) and something I can’t read under the ‘Inv’ button (orange).
And of course in case you missed it, a big fat GOTH in letter stickers 🙂
There’s countless memories in this simple device, and just seeing it yesterday brought back so many of them. For me this is priceless, and it’s now been very carefully packed away to survive another 30+ years 🙂
The ‘Depeche’ over the MODE key is genius. 😀
I would like to make clear that *I* saved this calculator. It’s possible I purchased it from you when you left for the US. I sent it to you years later.
I had a Casio fx-82 which was slower and showed only 8 digits instead of 10. We used to ‘race’ the trigonometric and factorial functions. I coveted your fx-100a with it’s fancy fraction input, hyperbolic trig functions, and random number generator. 🙂
I know you saved it, however I don’t think I sold it to you. I expect I just left it with you as I did many other things.