Texas-Instruments EXACTRA - New WEB for francis-teyssier.com

Texas-Instruments is a brand that made many different calculators, and was, in a way, a pioneer in this field. They are credited for the first silicon transistors, the first integrated circuit, and also the first hand help calculator in 1967.

I don't want to relist all the models in this brand, as some other Web Sites are dedicated to this, but I wanted to make a collection of a specific series, the EXACTRA models.

These models came out starting in 1974. Nothing really original, except maybe the bright Orange color:

Several models came out, the 19,20,21,22,23 and the 31. They were nothing else than cheaper versions of the existing calculators. If you look at the Exactra 19, you will see that there are only 6 digits, basic 4 operations, no memory, no scientific function.

With such a non-existent list of feature, they could have drown in history and be forgotten forever. But curiously it's very difficult to get an Exactra 19 these days. The reason has nothing to do with calculators, but rather with Star Wars, and light sabers. Here is an old picture of the prop used in Star Wars for the light saber of Luke Skywalker:

You will notice in the middle a very well know part of the LED calculators: the LED bubbles. And if you count the number of bubbles, this matches exactly the one we have on the Exactra 19 or 20.

So, here we had all the Star Wars fan dismounting the cheap Exactra to get this bubble lens and make their own light saber. You can imagine that the number of surviving calculators was going down. And this is reflected in the price or the surviving ones: