[tombert]

I love thinking about the "what if?" universe where we never figured out semiconductors and transistors, but still had roughly the same level of human progress. Would everything be clockwork like Syberia [1]? Would we have something akin to iPhones but done entirely with electro-mechanical stuff with antennas? I guess this is sort of the appeal of something like Steampunk.

Mechanical calculators are ridiculously cool to me. If I ever become an eccentric billionaire, I really want to buy an original Curta calculator [2], just because I respect the genius and engineering required to design such a thing.

The one in this video is also very cool. Very satisfying to watch all the gears turn at once.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syberia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta

[fooker]

Maybe without semiconductors we would stumble upon something better sooner.

Maybe optical/biological/quantum computing.

[sebzim4500]

You don't have to be a billionaire, I got a Curta mark I for ~£850 on ebay and it's like the world's greatest fidget toy.

[tombert]

£850 is actually cheaper than I thought it was, but it's still a bit much for me to justify right now. If I spent a grand on a fidget toy, I think my wife would be pretty mad at me.

Whatever patents that they had have to be expired, I kind of wish someone would make reproductions. I know there's the 3D printed ones, which are cool in their own right, but since 3D printers aren't super precise the parts have to be huge to compensate. I want as close to a one-to-one reproduction as possible, but I guess there's not much money in it.

[ddulaney]

It doesn’t help that they made an absolute ton of them: something like 140,000! That means that they’re not particularly rare, and it holds the price down.

Add in the fact that authenticity is part of the appeal, plus the fairly expensive process to make a decent replica, it’s not shocking that no replicas have emerged, even though cheap-ish CNCs mean it’s probably easier to do than it ever has been.

[MatthiasWandel]

I'm sure they would not have been less than £850 in whatever currency it was sold in back then, inflation adjusted. But the justification was much better than being a fidget toy.

[tombert]

Oh definitely, prior to having cheap computers that can compute gigaflops, I would definitely have bought one to do number crunching.

The problem is that if I bought one now, it would simply be a toy and nothing else. That's just a bit more than I'm willing to spend.

[econ]

Update it with USB so that it can take input and return results. Hook it up to a cash register for something like an antique store. Ideally one selling small items so that the customer can marvel at the display adding things up.

[tombert]

I also have always wanted one of those mechanical vintage cash registers, for the same reason I have always wanted a Curta. They always seemed like they would be fun to play with.

I could probably get one of those cash registers to play with for not a ton of money, but my house isn't huge and it's hard to justify the space.