casio al-8s
| here is a special variation of the al-8.
gone is the fancy 6 way slider switch, only the rounding mode switch
remains. square root, fractions, gt (grand total) and remainder have been
moved onto their own buttons - which is nice. hms conversion and
statistics are removed.
but excitingly, a new date feature has been added. you can perform date arithmetic. enter a date in the form year date month date day date pressing the date key between each part. once entered, the date is displayed along with the day of the week. for example, the 26th june 2004 is displayed as "04.06.26 6". the separate 6 indexes into the blue table to indicate saturday (see picture). dates can be subtracted to give the actual days between dates, also numbers can be added or subtracted from a date to calculate a new date. in all quite a neat feature not often seen outside a calculator program and quite cool for a machine this old (1977?). i checked the date arithmetic to discover that the internal leap year calculation works by checking for divisibility by 4. thus the valid range is from 1901 to 2099 outside which the unit will refuse and displays an error. i liked the fact that the date didnt go wrong over year 2000 (unlike the aq-1500). like its friends the al-8 and al-10 it is powered by 2 aa cells and has a bight display and highly tactile keys. |
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