ЕЛЕКТРОНИКА MK 52 & 61

[Ignatz]

So, eBay noticed I was buying HP calculators and decided to throw me a curve ball: there's a guy in Ukraine selling Soviet-era (or so I thought) HP knock-offs. They were only about £20 each, so I thought :'why not?'...

I got an ЕЛЕКТРОНИКА MK 52:



Which is a rather military-style unit, and ЕЛЕКТРОНИКА MK 61, which seems to be a Spice-series knock-off:



The build quality of these calculators is laughable: the 52 isn't so bad, but the 61... oh, my giddy aunt...



Just look at the way those keys sit! Horrible to the touch, and those bilious-green LEDs... the 'B^' is the 'ENTER' key on these (presumably from 'войти', 'ENTER' in Russian).



The manuals seem to be printed on toilet paper:



But the best, absolutely the best, has to be this:



That is the result of 3 ENTER 3 x^y... and it takes about four seconds to give the result. Happily, 3 ENTER 3 x 3 x does give 27. Just imagine running the Soviet space program on these buggers!!!

Oh, did I say 'Soviet'? My bad. I had assumed that these were from the Soviet era due to their rubbishy quality, but the 61 (I've got the box) has a date stamp of:



May 1995!!! Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union...