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Help?

Grr... stop that!
Very naughty... stumping me.
This is going to annoy someone but I’m stating telco on both, barely again.

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I picked up four boxes of what I was told were 75ish calculators.
Most of them are pocket size.
Some are scientific calculators.
Some are from the '70s, most from the '80s and a few from early '90s.

There's more than calculators in the boxes though. Some of these are early, electric day planners, thesaurus/dictionary/spellers, and a few are early HP Palm PCs. There's an ELSI or two or three calculators as well. One of the ELSI calculators has an early 3 digit vacuum tube display. Have not tried to power it up yet.

I went thru one box already and culled the calculators/planners etc that are dead for one reason or another.
Some of these are mint, unopened though. Not sure what to do with them. Does not seem to be a great demand for them. The ones I've culled, I've posted up to scrap out.

Thanks for getting back to me Lost!

RustyFuryIII

HP, TI, and IBM calculators have a bit of value even dead. Those are always worth eBaying.
Also check out sold prices in the filter on ebay. Any that pass $100 may be worth looking into eBay Valet. Where eBay will sell it for you.

TI is generally low value but both HP and IBM run double digits with triple being common enough, and occasionally into the low thousands. Those two are worth looking up.
TI calcs are so hard to sell people GIVE them away.
Pick them up at goodwill for $1.99 and strip them for $4 in scrap. Lol

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Question about attempting to sell dead, albeit, old calculators etc.

I know cosmetics plays a very large part when assessing value of something old and collectable.

A small percentage of these have some serious cosmetic damage to the face plate. These have been the ones that are, so far, dead. And by dead, typically, the battery has been left in far too long, and leaked out. In some cases, the circuit boards are a bit eaten up, circuitry/traces eaten up, corroded/destroyed, as well as the battery terminals.

In addition, some that have an input for a separate power supply, and/or data ports, the voltage input and and/or data pins are destroyed for what ever reason.

I just assumed the value of those would be nil, so I pulled them apart. If it's still worth putting them up for a bid on eBay, I'd give it a shot. Just hate to waste my time doing so, if no one bids because of the damaged items condition.

Off topic...

While going thru these, I've found that 99.9% are made in Japan.
Amazing quality of components. Well thought out construction and layout of components and materials.

Most of the manuals are in depth and in exceptionally well written English as well as Japanese. You could tell quality was paramount as there are numerous quality control papers signed off by the technicians in Japanese. All boxes signed and dated. Something you just don't see anymore.
You could tell the manufacturers were proud of what they were selling the customer.

Today, you can tell the manufacturers don't care. Manuals are poorly written, if included at all. And what you buy today has an extremely short life span due to shoddy construction and materials. Customer support is poor if available at all.

Ah well, I'm done waxing poetic of days gone by........

Lol on the previous post. So true.

External damage lowers price but doesn’t kill it off. Internal damage... generally junk it.
It’s ALWAYS worth looking calculators up, even pocket calculators. Like every collecting group there are people looking for rare one-off stuff in any condition.
But if the average sold price is $5 for new in box, not worth trying to sell it at all. But if you can only find 3 sales and all were over $50 it may be worth trying to sell a dead and damaged unit.

For clarification though, the highest sought after ones are from the late 70s back.
Or
Programmable calculators. Not the digital graphing calculator type but the small plastic strip card computer calculators that use actual programs.
These are just about always worth something no matter how damaged

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