The Never Never

The CBM calculator replaced the British Thornton slide rule, and a four function Sinclair Cambridge, a couple of useful but obsolete items at the start of the never ending upgrade path.

The new calculator was doing little for me at college though, exams fast approaching I was doing my usual thing of not revising enough, added into this was a pending marriage and a summons to appear at court over not having car tax.

It seems from my diary, that I was drinking and playing pool during the week, struggling with an emotional girlfriend at weekends and doing little to prepare for my Ordinary National Certificate in Engineering exams.

I talked to one of the lecturers, expressing my concern that too much was going on, that I wasn't prepared, that I needed more time.

I really did, I needed more time, but regardless of all my fears everything was going to happen, trouble with the law, final year exams and my first marriage.

There was no reprieve.

High Tech Apprentice

In all the turmoil of college and preparing for a premature marriage, a small highlight on the 12th February 1976 was the arrival in my life of a CBM scientific calculator.

The SR7919 :


CBM, that was Commodore Business Machines, the Ford Motor Company allowed the apprentices to buy these little wonders on the "never-never" taking fifty pence a week out of our pay packets.

The calculator was probably manufactured in England, but the company was founded in 1958 in Toronto, Canada.