intolerable.
Next— where to buy it?
If you want a reliable one, stay away from discounters, particularly those with a truck parked near the front door, decorated with an overgrown bedsheet reading:
HANDHELDS!!
TRUCKLOAD
SALE!!!!!!
The truckload lot will almost certainly be from some outfit in bankruptcy, and while the merchandise may be all right when you get it home, what do you do if it isn't?
If you want a good model, try a camera shop, a book store, or, better yet, a camera shop or book store on a large college campus . There you can expect to find a merchant with a discriminating—even spoiled—clientele, that will not hesitate to speak up or even boycott him if he doesn't back the product.
This brings us to the heart of the subject.
Which one to buy?
It is here that the worst mistakes can be made—mistakes even worse than paying fifty bucks for an OG-53 Experimental that will give wrong answers if you so much as bump it, and if you send it back to be fixed, they will return it unfixed by barge line. To avoid such things, look over what's available before buying.
Most handhelds fall into some special-purpose category, such as:
1) The descendents of the calculators of the mid-seventies. These are too well known to need description.
2) Historical Daters—Relatively simple and inexpensive—and said to have served as a training ground for making the more complex types. You punch the buttons and the screen lights up with the outstanding events of that date. Hit 1-4-9-2, and across the screen from right to left goes: "Christopher Columbus discovered America." A cheap dater may do nothing further. The better models have a wide button lettered "MORE." Tap it repeatedly, and you get: "Columbus sailed the Atlantic seeking a westward route to Asia . . . He had, in his first expedition, three ships: Santa Maria (100 tons), Pinta (50 tons), Niña (40 tons) . . . He was backed by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain . . ." The more expensive models go into incredible detail.
—If you buy one of these, watch out for the "bear-trapped" jobs, whose manufacturers smilingly put sixty percent of the machine's capacity into a few standard dates—knowing that those few dates are the ones most of us will try before buying.
There are scientific daters, military daters, religious daters, and so on. The latest is the "PHD" or "Personal History Dater." With this, you feed in the interesting events of the day before you go to sleep. Then later on, you can review your life by date—and so, of course, can anyone else who gets hold of this electronic diary. It's worth the extra money to get the kind that takes a look at your retinal patterns before it will talk.
3) "Pocket Prof" of "2SR" (Special Subject Reference). In a way, these are the most amazing of the handhelds. Take, for instance, the "GenChem I" put out by the most reliable and expensive U. S. maker. This is said to contain the equivalent of all the facts and data in the usual college course in general chemistry. Its main advantage over a textbook consists in its indexing . Though you can look up references by getting its index on the screen, there is another way. Tap the "CC" (Chemical Compound) button, then hit, say, H-2-O, and facts about water will be flashed on the screen as long as you care to persist, until every reference, direct and indirect, has been sought out and shown. Tap the "El" (Element) button, then tap C-A, and the same thing will be done for calcium. To find references to reactions or other relationships between calcium and water, tap these two sets of buttons, and also tap "Cnc" (for "connection"). References that concern both water and calcium will be flashed on the screen. Few books have an index even remotely as complete, and with the handheld you have only to glance at the screen to see if the reference shown is the one desired. This is an improvement over hunting up, one at a time, a long list of page numbers.
The
Next— where to buy it?
If you want a reliable one, stay away from discounters, particularly those with a truck parked near the front door, decorated with an overgrown bedsheet reading:
HANDHELDS!!
TRUCKLOAD
SALE!!!!!!
The truckload lot will almost certainly be from some outfit in bankruptcy, and while the merchandise may be all right when you get it home, what do you do if it isn't?
If you want a good model, try a camera shop, a book store, or, better yet, a camera shop or book store on a large college campus . There you can expect to find a merchant with a discriminating—even spoiled—clientele, that will not hesitate to speak up or even boycott him if he doesn't back the product.
This brings us to the heart of the subject.
Which one to buy?
It is here that the worst mistakes can be made—mistakes even worse than paying fifty bucks for an OG-53 Experimental that will give wrong answers if you so much as bump it, and if you send it back to be fixed, they will return it unfixed by barge line. To avoid such things, look over what's available before buying.
Most handhelds fall into some special-purpose category, such as:
1) The descendents of the calculators of the mid-seventies. These are too well known to need description.
2) Historical Daters—Relatively simple and inexpensive—and said to have served as a training ground for making the more complex types. You punch the buttons and the screen lights up with the outstanding events of that date. Hit 1-4-9-2, and across the screen from right to left goes: "Christopher Columbus discovered America." A cheap dater may do nothing further. The better models have a wide button lettered "MORE." Tap it repeatedly, and you get: "Columbus sailed the Atlantic seeking a westward route to Asia . . . He had, in his first expedition, three ships: Santa Maria (100 tons), Pinta (50 tons), Niña (40 tons) . . . He was backed by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain . . ." The more expensive models go into incredible detail.
—If you buy one of these, watch out for the "bear-trapped" jobs, whose manufacturers smilingly put sixty percent of the machine's capacity into a few standard dates—knowing that those few dates are the ones most of us will try before buying.
There are scientific daters, military daters, religious daters, and so on. The latest is the "PHD" or "Personal History Dater." With this, you feed in the interesting events of the day before you go to sleep. Then later on, you can review your life by date—and so, of course, can anyone else who gets hold of this electronic diary. It's worth the extra money to get the kind that takes a look at your retinal patterns before it will talk.
3) "Pocket Prof" of "2SR" (Special Subject Reference). In a way, these are the most amazing of the handhelds. Take, for instance, the "GenChem I" put out by the most reliable and expensive U. S. maker. This is said to contain the equivalent of all the facts and data in the usual college course in general chemistry. Its main advantage over a textbook consists in its indexing . Though you can look up references by getting its index on the screen, there is another way. Tap the "CC" (Chemical Compound) button, then hit, say, H-2-O, and facts about water will be flashed on the screen as long as you care to persist, until every reference, direct and indirect, has been sought out and shown. Tap the "El" (Element) button, then tap C-A, and the same thing will be done for calcium. To find references to reactions or other relationships between calcium and water, tap these two sets of buttons, and also tap "Cnc" (for "connection"). References that concern both water and calcium will be flashed on the screen. Few books have an index even remotely as complete, and with the handheld you have only to glance at the screen to see if the reference shown is the one desired. This is an improvement over hunting up, one at a time, a long list of page numbers.
The
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