Vintage Casio B1 calculator teardown

[michaelturner]

I've still got one of these Casio B1, that I originally bought in October 1978 from WH Smith. Now coming on for 43 years old, and still working perfectly.

[Lee-xofk]

Informative video Kris. I got the same model, although payed £5 - 10? a few years ago on ebay, so you got a bargain. Did a bit of research; this model was in production from 1978 - 1980, and were also released as a 'Boots' clone. Japanese electronics really were great quality.

I was born in 1971, and remember these calculators in daily use, so bought it for sentimental reasons.

[michaelturner]

I've got a couple of new VFD digital clocks I bought in China, and these use VFDs that were originally intended for microwave ovens.

[TheMangeGrain]

My mother had one of these in 1978, or some other - very similar - version also with top-left switch and %/Δ% key). She used it for home budget. And I used to spend entire evenings playing with it. I guess it triggered - more or less - my career choice as a software engineer. So I bought myself one on eBay recently, to fire "muscular memory"... As usual on "4 operations" calculators, it's algebraic but it has no concept of operator precedence (PEMDAS convention). It's AES "chain input" method so "1 + 2 * 3 =" will be evaluated as 9 instead of 7. You have to enter higher priority operators first : "2 * 3 + 1 = 7". You can also use the memory to store intermediate results, force precedence or even perform additions or substractions. Example : " 5 * 4 - 3 * 2 =" (result is 14 on a PEMDAS-compliant calculator) can be performed as " 5 x 4 M+ 3 x 2 M- MR ". That's only 1 keypress more ! And it can square root, so I was able to resolve quadratic equations with it. I can think of no practical use-case for it in 2023. But it's an interesting and enjoyable device.