Q: What the heck is this “computer museum” that you keep talking about?
A: It’s just a bunch of junk that I have collected over the years that used to be useful for calculating stuff. For example, here is my Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator.
Q: What the heck is a “Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator”?
It is basically an abacus with a stylus, cleverly marketed using the words “brain” and “calculator”, and most important of all…. “magic” in order to sucker less astute children out of their allowance money. Here’s how it works. Suppose you want to add the numbers 6 and 5 together. You take the stylus and put it into the hole next to the number “6”, like this:
Then, according to the CMBC instructions, if the column color is red, you pull the stylus down like this:
That enters the number 6 in the little window at the top. To add 5 to it, stick the stylus into the number 5, like this:
Since the column color is white, you move the stylus up and around to add in the 5. Like this:
The “around” action carries the surplus value to the next column over. You can see that the number 11 is in the windows at the top. Easy peasy.
To clear the calculator, pull the top bar up.
So, that’s it. I spent my pennies on this thing way back in the ’50s, and I still have it. How do you spell P-A-C-K R-A-T?
Borrowing heavily from Mark Twain’s comment about pool, “Owning a Chadwick Magic-Brain Calculator is a sign of a wasted childhood”.
You can actually still find these things on ebay for a few bucks, being sold by people who are smarter than some others and who are cleaning this stuff out of their closets instead of hanging it on a wall next to their $5 calculator, which can do the same calculation in a nano-second.