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by d_silin 1536 days ago
I had one as a kid. Incredibly capable machine with just a hundred bytes of RAM.

You could play real-time games on it, using GRAD-DEG-RAD switch as hardware joystick!

3 comments

Wouldn't exactly call it capable, it had 20 memory registers and 106 bytes of programming memory. Plus Reverse Polish Notation is not exactly easy to use. Still great memories, so many kids of my generation discovered computers through those. I actually got one from eBay last year, cost me about $60 with 220->110 converter. I think somebody's selling unsold inventory from the factory. Printed out some old articles and went through first 2 legs of Kon-Tiki journey. Fun times :)
Yes, MK-52 and MK-61 always had a large community of tinkerers around them, exploiting hardware and software bugs (or rather the machine's extreme simplicity) to write seemingly impossible programs. The bugs were never fixed in later revisions though, so while they were fun to play with as a kid, I have mixed feelings about it as an adult engineer. Having an errata instead of actual bugfix wasn't very helpful. My uncle hated them back in the days for this, and when home computer kits appeared, he got one and never looked back.
To illustrate its capabilities, it could find a solution to 8-queens problem in 5 hours, but the program size was only 54 bytes.
54 _bytes_? Thats astounding. I just checked a sample haiku in utf-8 and it was 72 bytes.

Gorgeous and adorable website! Even the markup is admirable.