Modern Technology in an Old Way

The other day Blaubeere brought  a couple of her kids over and we all went to the local childrens' museum for a while.  As the kids were playing and having fun we noticed an interesting thing happening.  Dragon, who is six and doesn't remember ever a time when stores didn't scan purchases, was playing with his little sister in the grocery store section of the museum.  His sister brought a basket full of groceries to where Dragon was pretending to check her groceries.  His register was an antique, mechanical calculating machine, old enough that it had individual keys for each number, one through zero, in all the columns up to the seventh or eighth place.  The biggest number you could punch in was 99,999,999.99.  The way those old machines worked was you'd punch in your number and then pull the lever down to "enter" it.  Then you'd punch the function key and then do your next number.  They typically only did the four basic functions, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Lots of key punches to do very limited calculations.  Certainly no scanning as is found on modern store registers.  So young Dragon had to fill in the gaps with his imagination.  The place where the adding machine paper feed out with a "tape" of your calculations became the scanner.  Never mind the lever, it served no purpose.  Nor did the keys get much, if any use.  But the "scanner" was sure busy.

It was a hoot to watch him and suddenly realize what he was doing.  Neither he nor his sister skipped a beat, it was groceries on the counter, scan them, and into the bag with them.  They were moving along at quite a pace, just like at the grocery store.  It was fun to watch.