Where There is a Will - 15. I Buy More Stuff

 15.  I Buy More Stuff!

There are "thrift shops" here. These usually buy or accept donations of used goods, sell them at a very low price. I find a "clock radio" for sale. I have always been fascinated by the clock radio concept.

Back home, in the 1960s, my hobby was to assemble radios and transistors. I remember how I was trying to convert one of my transistor sets to a "clock-radio". I had bought a chinese clock and opened it to insert a metal ring and wire it to make my own clock radio. I did not fully succeed in bringing my "invention" to a finished product.

Here I find a working clock radio! It is a clock and transistor combo. It has even a power outlet to get your coffee pot started in the morning, when the alarm goes!

I also find slide-rules available for 50 cents! When I started my third year of engineering, one of my uncles presented me with a 6-inch slide rule. As a Civil Engineering student I could get by with that slide rule. A 12-inch slide rule was required and it cost something like Rs. 80, more than one month meal at the hostel! So, I could not resist buying this slide rule for 50 cents, though everybody uses only calculators these days (1977).
6” Slide Rule


I could afford a Slide Rule!  This is the one I bought for $0.50 at Evanston in 1977

When did they stop making slide rules?
July 11, 1976
Slide rules became increasingly popular in the 1950s and 1960s, before beginning to fall out of favor to pocket calculators, which, by the mid 1970s, had become affordable and were considered significantly easier to use by the masses. The last slide rule manufactured in the United States was produced on July 11, 1976.
***************** What IS a Slide Rule?