Hello Old Friend

[DavidM]

Not long ago I mentioned in a thread that I once had a 48sx that had been stolen when my home was burglarized some years back.

I discovered this past weekend that indeed it wasn't. The 48sx was found in a box that a friend had packed for me during a move. That was great news! The bad news: unfortunately it has been in a storage facility for the last ten years. While I was happy to find it, I wasn't optimistic that it would be functional. The storage facility isn't climate-controlled, and for the last ten years everything in it has been subjected to the heat/cold/humidity/dust extremes that are common to those types of units.

When I got it home, the first thing I checked was the battery compartment. Unfortunately, there were three alkalines left in it. There was obvious corrosion damage from the leaking cells. I also had a 32K memory card in it, but fortunately there was no battery installed for that. The card showed no signs of problems when I removed it.

The entire body (including the display) had areas of mildew and other debris, so I spent some time attempting to clean it up. I was able to remove much of it, but the paint on the faceplate has several areas where the paint has started flaking off and/or has some other abnormality.

I then focused my attention on the display, which has a discolored area in the lower left quadrant of the screen. Close inspection showed that the area of concern was not on the surface, but rather embedded in the screen itself. Not a good sign:



I figured I would try to power it up just to see what would happen, so I installed a fresh set of batteries. To my utter amazement, it powered up successfully in the usual manner. The "F" key worked to clear the memory at the "Try to recover" prompt, and I was presented with the usual setup. So far, so good:



The next step: check the keys and load some things on the stack to see what happens. It was evident very quickly that the display problem was related to the actual LCD pixels themselves. Unfortunately, the pixels in the affected area are non-functional:



Filling the display with dark pixels shows more clearly the extent of the damage:



...and a close up of the damaged area:



I'm guessing that the only way to clear this up would be to replace the display, but I'm certainly open to trying any suggestions others may have to see what happens. I suspect that replacing the display is beyond my personal skill level, and likely would cost more than it's worth for someone else to do it. So I'll probably just live with it as-is.

Amazingly, all the keys worked flawlessly. Given all the external blemishes caused by the mildew, I was very surprised that the keyboard seemed no worse off than the last time I used it 15 years ago.

After running some of the internal diagnostics, I powered it off and inserted the RAM card. The card seems to work without problems, though I need to get a battery for it to see if it maintains its integrity when not powered from the calculator.

Apart from the damaged screen (and a missing IR/Port cover), the calculator seems to function normally. I was even able to restore a ca. 1995 backup to it that I found on an old data CD. It was interesting to see what I had been using on the 48 at the time -- it was like stepping into a time machine for a few minutes as I re-discovered what I had been doing. I'm starting to have a better understanding of those who have extensive collections of these things. The memories it caused went well beyond the programs I had been using.

(edited to update image links)