I found this calculator by accident, buried in a drawer I hadn’t properly sorted for years. It was one of the small promotional units I used to give customers in the mid 1990s — slim, black, with a neat gold strip and my business details printed across the top. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It felt like the sort of object that would have quietly died sometime around the millennium.
It hadn’t. Of course, when I pressed the power button, nothing happened. The battery was long gone, so I looked out a replacement. After a short detective session by the young man in the hardware shop, who took genuine pride in identifying the correct button cell, I tracked one down. He approached the problem with the earnest concentration of someone decoding a minor mystery. Button cells have their own taxonomy — LR1130, AG10, SR1130 ... — a bewildering equivalence chart in front of him. He worked it out, eventually. A small, obsolete puzzle from one era to another, solved with patience and curiosity.
I got back home, inserted the new battery and typed in a random number, 3663, simply to confirm it was alive.
There was something pleasingly matter‑of‑fact about the whole experience. No sentimentality, just the recognition that this small, inexpensive device had endured. It was designed to be functional, not memorable, yet here it was: still capable of doing exactly what it was made to do.
These calculators were never grand gestures. They were practical giveaways, chosen because they were useful, portable, and unlikely to be thrown away immediately. Seeing one again reminded me how straightforward that logic was. A customer could actually use it. It didn’t pretend to be anything more.
Now, decades later, its survival feels almost like a quiet joke — a reminder that some technologies persist because they are simple, durable, and unbothered by the passage of time. It is a small object, but it has earned its place as a curiosity: and it still works.
And, as I’ve since discovered, these little calculators turn up on eBay and similar sites, sold as retro novelties. I won’t be going on a world cruise on the proceeds of mine, but it’s oddly satisfying to know it has entered the ranks of collectible curiosities.