Rick Bensene - Old Calculator Museum

[Don R (Xerox6085)]

Has anyone heard from Rick Bensene curator of the Old Calculator Museum recently?

https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/

Seems the contact email address no longer works.

Thank You

Don Resor

[Douglas Miller]

I have not had direct contact recently, but someone else has. I'll try and track down what that was. Yes, the web site email is broken.

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[oldcalculators]

Hello to the list,

I apologize for the difficulty in getting in touch with me over the past few months.  Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with a very serious brain circulatory system problem called an Arterial-Venous Fistula(AVF) that was essentially a time-bomb in my head just waiting to go off.   This defect could have ruptured at any time, instantly causing a catastrophic brain bleed that more than likely would have meant virtually instantaneous death at best, or traumatic brain damage at worst.

Six weeks ago, I had very delicate brain surgery to correct this defect.  The surgery went  well, and I've been slowly recovering from it.   Brain surgery takes a lot out of a person, with a lot of fatigue, as well as headaches, and significant pain from the rather long incision in my scalp to allow access to the skull to cut a hole in it approximately the size of an old Eisenhauer Silver Dollar to access the defect and correct it. 

I had a consultation with my neurosurgeon yesterday, and his only concern is that I still have a fairly persistent headache on the right side of my head where the surgery was done.   He put in an order for a brain MRI to see if there is anything abnormal going on that could be the cause.   Hopefully the MRI will come back good, and it'll just be a matter of time for the headache to settle down.

All that said, I've not had much time to work on anything related to the Old Calculator Museum for most of the year so far.   I had made a change to the email address used for contacting me through the website, but that change never got propagated from the development site to the production site, and the alias for the old EMail address was removed, which meant that any attempts to contact me through the website would bounce with an unknown user error.

I have corrected this problem as of today (7-Jun-2025), so now contact through the website's EMail page (oldcalculatormuseum.com/email.html) will now work.

Apologies to those who may have tried to reach me over the past few months and ended up getting bounce messages.   Please try re-sending your message through the website and I will respond as quickly as I can.

Best regards to all,

-Rick

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Rick Bensene

The Old Calculator Museum

https://oldcalculatormuseum.com

Beavercreek, Oregon  USA

[snek...@gmail.com]

Dear Rick,  

I was so happy to hear that you're on the mend after your recent health challenges. Your insightful and detailed responses to my emails over the years have been invaluable, and I’ve always deeply appreciated your expertise.  

You are truly a treasure in the world of vintage calculators—not just for your technical knowledge, but also for your understanding of their role in the broader history of electronics. Your contributions are irreplaceable.  

Wishing you continued good health and a full recovery. Take care!  

Best regards,  
Sirous Nekooei  
https://sites.google.com/view/snekooei-calculator-museum  

[Jack Rubin]

Hey Rick – glad to hear you’re well!

Best,

Jack

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[Christian Tobar]

Yikes! That is scary! I'm glad to hear the surgery went well and I hope you continue to recover. I have been to your website before, and it was definitely a lot of help when I was doing research on a few of my vintage calculators. Take it easy, and get better!

- Chris Tobar 

San Bernardino, California 

Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer

[Rick Bensene]

Hi, Chris,

Thank you so kindly for your thoughtful message.   I'm doing pretty well, considering all that has happened, and am just doing as you suggested and taking it easy and letting things settle down and heal.    I definitely appreciate the comment about you having used the Old Calculator Museum website in the past to help with researching old calculators.   I am glad that the site has proved useful to you.    I just hope that things in my life will all settle down enough that I have some time to dig into the large backlog of calculators that I have to document and put up on the site, as well as doing some serious updates to some of the existing exhibits in order to incorporate additional information that I've become aware of.    Hopefully, that will be sooner rather than later.

Wishing you good health, safety, security, and contentedness in these rather chaotic times.

Sincere regards,

-Rick

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Rick Bensene

The Old Calculator Museum

https://oldcalculatormuseum.com

Beavercreek, Oregon  USA

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/oldcalculatorforum/1125240544.696503.1749421955659%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Mike Hatch]

Hi Rick, 

Just heard the news about your diagnosis but very so glad you are now on the mend and I hope it continues. 

I had seen your website some time ago and recently stumbled acrosss it again when searching data for an  Olympia RASE 4/30-3. 

Have also seen the comments above that your email is having troubles as I had sent you an email to  - oldcal...@bensene.com - and had it rejected, is it still broken ?

Your - Wanted - page lists the  Olympia RASE 4/30-3 as one you are looking for, I have one of the printing only style if thats of any interest, let me know.

Keep well and continue the recovery.

All the best - Mike hatch

www.soemtron.org - mi...@soemtron.org

[Rick B]

Hello, Mike,

Yeah, things have been rather a roller coaster since Sept. of 2024.   I lost my job due to staff reduction at the company I worked for, and due to symptoms of Long-COVID that I experience, I'm unable to do much in the way of full-time work anymore because I have random periods of intense and overwhelming need to sleep.   It's such that I will fall asleep sitting at the computer, and wake up hours later sitting in my chair, with the screen filled with whatever key(s) my fingers happened to land on.   I have no idea how long I've been asleep when I wake up, and many times, I'm still extremely tired when I do wake up.   I've been through all kinds of testing and medications to try to remediate it, but nothing has worked.  It isn't narcolepsy, it's called hypersomnia.   If I start to feel it coming on when driving, I have enough time to find a place to pull over safely and sleep it off in the car.   Needless to say, falling asleep on the job isn't something that most employers relish.    I've taken all kinds of different drugs from amphetamines (prescription) to various brain chemistry altering medications and nothing works.   The sleepiness is so strong it will push right through the buzz of amphetamines, and I fall asleep anyway.   The company I worked for didn't care what hours I worked or when, so I was able to keep up with my work by working when I was awake and alert, and sleep when I wasn't.   I worked from home, so when I got sleepy, I just went to bed.   It worked out just fine.   Most of the work I did was stuff that needed to be done during off hours, and I found that between around midnight and 3 AM I had a period of wakefulness (if I wasn't already asleep) where I could get a lot of work done.  However, declining economic conditions led to the company having to make cuts, and sadly, my job and four others were cut.   I tried to get unemployment, but at the time, the Oregon Unemployment Division was suffering essentially a melt-down of their services due to archaic computer systems and understaffing, and after fighting with them for almost three months, I gave up.   My wife become our sole income, and she is self-employed, but has a stable business, and we've been barely holding on.   I tried to file for Social Security, and that turned into a nightmare because of a mistake they made years ago when I had a period where I was on Social Security Disability, and they overpaid me and didn't tell me about it until I applied for regular Social Security...$33,000!   They refused to give me Social Security benefits until I paid up.   It took almost two full years of fighting with them, and they finally cut the amount to just under $18,000, and allowed me to cut my monthly benefit by $1,000/month to pay it off...even though it was all their fault.   I had little choice.   Even with Social Security and Medicare, we are living on the edge financially.   My wife just turned 65, and she recently was diagnosed with breast cancer, and went through a surgery and is now on special medications to try to keep it from coming back, which was a big scare, and had her off work for some time, furthering the money crunch.   She wants to cut back on the hours she is working, but we can't afford it, which is tough on her.  She doesn't want to take Social Security because she doesn't get full benefit until she turns 67, so she's got just under two more years before she can take Social Security.    Then, of course, in the midst of all of this, the situation with my brain circulatory defect came up.  It was discovered completely by accident, thankfully so.   Had I not had a symptom that led to them doing a contrast-enhanced brain MRI, it never would have been discovered, and I could have dropped dead from it at any time.   The symptom turned out to be in my inner ear, and has been fixed with a medication, but at first they thought it might have been in my brain which is why they did the MRI.   I'm pretty much completely recovered from the surgery and all, but it will take a few years for my skull to completely fuse back the areas that they cut out and replaced, with a fine Titanium mesh with tiny screws and special adhesive holding the pieces in place while the bone fuses back together.   I have ridges in my scalp where the bone is regrowing, which can be annoying when they catch the brush when I comb my hair.   They are kind of sore all the time, not the kind of sore that is distracting, but you notice it when something disturbs the ridges, like coming hair or when I wash my hair and massage my scalp.      The financial situation has pretty much shut down any calculator acquisitions unless they are donations, and even then I can no longer offer to pay shipping like I used to.   Sleeping so much (sometimes up to 12-14 hours a day) doesn't help with progress on research/documenting machines for the website, either.  So, not much has been going on.  Back in mid Sept. of 2024, my servers here (I run my own servers for EMail and other services) ended up getting hacked.  A piece of malware got onto my wife's phone, and migrated into my infrastructure via her accidentally leaving the WiFi on her phone turned on when she returned from a trip, and from there, it proceeded to crypto-lock my servers.   Of course, I was not about to pay ransom (they wanted $18,000 for the decryption key), so I had to rebuild everything from scratch. Fortunately, I had good, immutable backups that the cryptoware couldn't touch, but it's still a tedious and slow process.  I didn't lose any data through the whole thing, but   I am still, if you can believe it, working on getting all the services running again, and my "bensene.com" email is still broken.   I hope to have it fixed here within the next couple of weeks, but some of it is compounded by my local ISP getting rid of all of their DSL connections and converting everything to fiber, and their DSL service has been really dicey, which is where my static IP is for inbound EMail.   They are supposed to get me up on Gigabit fiber within the next couple of weeks, which should finally enable me to get my EMail services running properly again.   For now, I'm on Gmail, which I hate, but it is what it is.   I'm glad you were able to find me here.    So, life hasn't been much fun as of late, but I'm just thankful I'm still around, and though I'm sleeping a lot of my life away, once my Social Security checks start coming (first one comes later this month), and I can start drawing a bit from my IRA here and there, things will hopefully get a bit better financially.   I just pray that my wife's surgery and treatments (she had radiation after the surgery, and is on some special hormone treatments to help minimize the chances of recurrence) keep any future cancer at bay, and that we can both stay relatively healthy, though I just came off a long bout of a very bad cold that came on just after Christmas, and I am still having major chest congestion and coughing up phlegm.   I went to my doctor last week, and I guess I have bacterial pneumonia, so I'm on strong antibiotics that make me feel pretty rotten to kill it off.   It's too early to tell yet, but hopefully here in a few days I should start to notice my chest not feeling so packed.   

Sorry it's all run together above, I am really tired and just let the brain run out the fingers, and didn't bother with paragraphs and such.   I hope it makes sense.

While I'd love to get your printing Olympia machine, there's no way I could afford it, not even the shipping cost.   It's literally down to returning beverage cans/containers to the store for deposit to pay for groceries.   We'll get through it, as there are some reserves that I can tap into once spring rolls around that will help out a lot, but just have to get there first.

Thanks for writing and for your concern.

All the best,

-Rick  

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/oldcalculatorforum/e5f6698e-172c-4a42-ad05-4ef7dd55caffn%40googlegroups.com.

[Mike Hatch]

Wishing you and your wife all the best Rick, keep strong and getting better.