Totally Wired?
IT WAS an unremarkable black plastic slab which, said my aunt’s neighbour, could do sums. He had brought it back from a holiday overseas, and it was the first electronic calculator I had ever seen. I reported sagely back to my parents that it was as pointless as the electric toothbrush we saw on TV. Why would anyone pay so much money for machines like these, which did simple everyday things like cleaning teeth and sums? I was 11.
Three years later, a cardboard box arrived in the mail with a thrilling, rather NASA-ish brand and model number: Texas Instruments TI-58E. My younger brother, a shrewder judge of the zeitgeist than me, had saved his pocket money for months to buy it. My sister and I learned that if you held it upside down the LED lights could be made to say SHELLOIL, BOOB and gO 2 hELL.
