Following on from last year (RetroTechUK 2025) we once again went on a pilgrimage to the big room full of old things for sale: it’s one of those events with an entrance free, it’s got a lot of audio things but also some computer things.
There’s a video here, not too long, not by us but we are briefly visible. It’s towards the end of the day so the very best things have already gone.
I only made a couple of purchases, one the 1938 BBC Handbook (“This Handbook records the most notable events and developments in the fifteenth year of the British Broadcasting service”) and the other a programmable calculator, indeed a graphical calculator. With 422 bytes free. Here are some photos of the calculator:
Here are some photos from the event:
Edit: I see Casio have a page on the history of the fx-7000G
including a video
Yoshino resolved to figure out a way to create a scientific calculator that could produce graphs, and immediately wrote down his ideas in a one-page proposal in 1983. This proposal described drawing a graph for y=x2 on a calculator display. When he presented this proposal, the project was approved right away. And the developers wasted no time getting started with their work.
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In 1985, Casio released the world’s first scientific calculator with graphing functionality, the fx-7000G.