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January 16, 2005 10:23 AM   Subscribe

The real Kraftwerk pocket calculator! With a sound sample of it playing 'Computerwelt'. I never knew this existed!
posted by starscream (16 comments total)
 
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.

Awesome. I never would have guessed the band / song were named after a real calculator.
posted by driveler at 10:30 AM on January 16, 2005


Inspired a real calculator, that is.
posted by driveler at 10:36 AM on January 16, 2005


So the part where it said "no copying to other servers allowed"?

..that didn't really stop me.
posted by jscott at 10:52 AM on January 16, 2005


bad jscott. ;)

dang, and xmas is over... I want this!
posted by dabitch at 11:02 AM on January 16, 2005


Driveler:
Kraftwerk's first albums came out in the mid-70's and the name means: "Power Plant". My guess is the Casio calculator is either an in-house modification to an off the shelf product or a special licensing deal (how wonderful is that to contemplate?).
posted by felix betachat at 11:31 AM on January 16, 2005


I had an old "musical" Casio calculator similar to this one. My favorite thing to do with it was to "play" (irregular) square roots - I would just hit the button over and over for a new tune each time.
posted by O9scar at 11:36 AM on January 16, 2005


wow, I didn't realize that there was more than one casio keyboard/calculator. I had this one, of Da Da Da fame,

posted by mosch at 11:55 AM on January 16, 2005


Wow, mosch, I had that same one. Did yours come with a card/cartrige thingy that made it play "Greensleeves?"
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:11 PM on January 16, 2005


Ditto elwoodwiles. I may out-dork you both though - I used to actually take it to school and use it during math. Da-da-divisor.
posted by phong3d at 12:41 PM on January 16, 2005


actually, during their last tour, they actually came out from behind their instruments and played 'pocket calculator' off of some calculators! it was crazy. Unfortunately I couldn't ID the make or model.
posted by djdrue at 12:55 PM on January 16, 2005


I had that Casio too, and the coolest thing I ever did with it was a crude low-fi multitrack song using samples from the infamous Quincy punk lecture episode. That was nearly 25 years ago. Sadly, the cassette is long gone.
posted by davebush at 1:51 PM on January 16, 2005


Had? I still have a Casio VL-Tone. It's the jam, yo.
posted by neckro23 at 3:34 PM on January 16, 2005


Didn't they use this thing to make the soundtrack for Peasant's Quest?
posted by bardic at 3:41 PM on January 16, 2005


I guess that about this time Casio came out with the similarly musical MG-880, which featured Number Invaders. This was the best way of wearing out a calculator keyboard (save, perhaps, for doing '1 ++', and hitting the = key, racing each other to 100 on the old Casio FX-82s).
posted by scruss at 3:57 PM on January 16, 2005


mosch, that's basically the same synthesizer as this calculator... They are both of the monophonic "VL" series (which I believe refers to their synth "engine" that is a type of FM/phase synthesis).
posted by basicchannel at 4:05 PM on January 16, 2005


Wow, I'm kind of surprised I didn't know that this existed as well. If you're interested and didn't know this already, most of the synthesized voices on Computerwelt were provided by the Texas Instruments Language Translator (mp3 sample here).
posted by Venadium at 7:05 PM on January 16, 2005


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