Two-fer! Another calculator in my button box. I loved this one because I wanted to keep it in tact. I mean it's all inclusive. It doesn't have the foam or plastic I'm sure it was packed in, but everything else was there. It was a genuine piece of cheap ass electronic history. Unisonic was a big cheap ass electronics maker of the 70's and 80's and they were sold by everyone. They pretended to be quality.

I love this old retail sh*t. Because this was so small, it was likely kept behind the counter so they don't walk away on their own.  That's why there is no price marked.  But, the store name is THERE!

BEST Products was a "catalog showroom" but it was more than as most stores were pretty big inside. I bought a lot of stuff from BEST because the stuff they sold was a bit better than K-Mart or Zayre or Gold Circle and it was a bit cheaper. I even bought an "Amstrad" computer before I realized that it was a POS after going to a real computer store and looking in magazines. Geeze, is that what we did before the internet? You bet. Even with limited resource, the details I found made me drag the hot piece of poop back to Best.

This was the company that was written up in one of Weekly Reader's "young adult" books for having odd store shapes. Here is a great link to see what I saw:   http://www.failedarchitecture.com/the-ironic-loss-of-the-postmodern-best-store-facades/  -- (I know I broke this blog's "no links" rule again, but hell I loved the architecture.  Although Best was out by 1997, I disagree with the bloggers comment that E-Bay and Amazon were the cause.  When Wal-Mart and Target moved in and big box electronics stores such as Mace and SUN and Circuit City and BESS BUY moved in, out went BEST.)  Soon after Best bit the big "B" , but longer than thought, U.S. Merchandise, the other catalog house in Cleveland went under. A few years later when I moved to Louisville, I got to see the last gasp of Service Merchandise, the last of the catalog houses.  Ahhh, retail death. Hmmm, there's a book in there somewhere. (BWAHAHAHA) The logo on this BEST tag is an older logo. My Best had the last logo for the company with the logo with letters that increased in size. Wow. Fascinating.

FATHANZ cameo. There was no other reason to put this one in here.  Look at the side of the calculator box with the big brand name on the side and the Radio Shack circle. It also lets us know where it was made. You got questions? We dunno.

This calc actually was a full featured clock/alarm in addition to being a calculator. Yes, it took button batteries. No, I didn't replace them once they died. In fact, I didn't really use this. I didn't need a clock or a calc, let alone a combined clockcalc. I did like it for the classic look and the Best price tag on the box. That was it. It had a little speaker in it so it would "tweet" a harsh alarm. Teensy buttons for the calc plus a function switch finished out this value added package.

Now the trouble with cheap LCD displays when they came out. "Wheedoggie! I stuck oil! Ellie Mae! Stop banging producers in the SEEMENT pond!" I guess this wasn't protected from any pressure pressing down on the display, but then, it's got Microvision (TM) style "screen rot". From Wikiwikiwikikeekee "Poor sealing and impurities introduced during manufacture has resulted in the condition known as screen rot." Yep. That describes this calculator. The materials used to seal in the lifeblood just gets old and allows it to leak. I imagine this would still work but not do much. Cheap watches seem to do this as well. Now, I may just REPLACE  the display! Yeah! Someone has got to have the replacement part for this right?

Yay! By these terms this has been out of warranty for 87 years! Yeah. They only want 9 bucks to do the repair plus postage and that means $2654 total will get me a repaired.... oh wait. Ahh poo. Unisonic's Option. That means they might send a REPLACEMENT, not this official logged for prosperity junk blog item! I can't have that! It makes me wonder if any really cheap product sent back to the repair center within warranty time ever did get repaired or replaced? I've only tried it once, when my sound card/modem had sound issues. (You see we had to use these things called MODEMS way back when, and to save money, the $1100 100MHZ 1G HD 16 Meg RAM 3.5 Floppy IBM clone computer I'd bought had the 14.4 modem on the same card as the 16 bit sound card.) They sent me another and it worked great. I gave the modem to Boomer who got his first discarded parts computer on line because of the 14.4 goodness. ("You have WEBTV? No, this can't be! Here, we've got enough parts for a computer..." ) The other time I tried to get replacement parts for something long forgotten was when I bought a "Flying Finnegan" game from a thrift shop. It had the card to send to Kenner to get replacement parts for 50 cents. I ordered because I needed some small part. Game came out in 1978  and was a "Mousetrap" style build a device game.  I received a nice letter from the Kenner Corporation that I was screwed. "Crushing childhood dreams since 1947."

-Ric