Rant #1,384: Brain Cramp

My brain works just fine.

It is 57 years old, going on 58 in a few weeks, and I can remember things that happened more than 50 years ago with a clearness that even I am impressed with.

And I hope it stays that way. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and there is no worse way to go out in this world than having that terrible, awful disease.

Whatever the case, last week, I had a real brain cramp that no one could rectify, but myself.

I don't know why, but sometimes the mind wanders, even when you are using it and are very busy, and that is just what happened to me at work in the middle of last week.

All of a sudden, I started to think about a game or toy that I played with not as a little kid, but as an older kid, maybe when I was 11 or 12 or 13 years old.

It was like an abacus, but the balls were not set into the game, the marbles used could move independently and could actually fall off the game if you were not careful.

It was some type of counting game, and you could ask the game mathematical questions, and it would give you the answers.

You could also compete against the game, and you would never win.

It sounds like a very early, non-electric version of a computer, and that is really exactly what it was.

But what I could not figure out was its name. I simply could not remember what it was called.

I went all over the Internet during my lunch break to try to find out what this game was called, and I came up empty.

I went onto Facebook, and nobody knew what I was talking about.

But again, my mind was searching its memory cells a bit more after a few hours of this consternation, and it was becoming clearer to me what it was called.

Was it NEM, or NIM, or NOM, or MEM or ... I could not figure it out.

This pretty much went into the next day.

I still used the Internet to try and check on this thing, but to no avail.

But then, again, my brain worked beautifully. I think I remembered the name!

Yes, when I checked Dr. NIM, I hit paydirt.

This game or toy or early computer or whatever you want to call it came out in the late 1960s, and it did just what I said it did.

It played number games with the user, and it remarkably always won out.

I was completely fascinated with this thing as a pre-teen, played it all the time, but somehow, it completely faded from my memory, until that moment last week, decades after I last played it.

Doing some research, it actually was the basis of a very early electronic computer too, so it was really more than a game or a toy, it was more like a template for something bigger and better.

I searched around, and no, it is not made anymore. Through the years, several people have sold their Dr. NIMs on the Internet through eBay and other sources, but right now, it isn't being sold, at least online.

I would love to have another one, and I am on the lookout for one as we speak.

If you have one, and want to sell it, please contact me. If the price is reasonable--I have seen them go for maybe $25 or so, a lot more than the $5 or so the thing originally cost--maybe we can make a deal.

I would love to play Dr. NIM again. It will bring me back to a different time and place, and will exercise my brain a bit.

Dr. NIM is one doctor that I wouldn't mind visiting.