More calculators

[mmcirvin]

Oh, great, I've got myself paging through people's online calculator collections again.

This Omron was my first calculator. I had others after that, for which I don't recall having much affection until I got one of these Sharp BASIC-programmables, which was pretty nice (though it was a low-end one).

The newest dedicated handheld calculator I have now is actually an HP-28S from the mid-Eighties, a radically advanced calculator for the time (whose peculiar little N cells have, at this writing, died--I should replace them sometime, though the incredibly poorly designed battery compartment makes this easier said than done). I used to have a 48SX but somebody stole it ages ago. I've got an emulator for my computer, though. The RPL language that they both use is probably my favorite computer language of all time.

I thought pocket calculator development had stagnated, but it looks as if various companies have been putting out ever more advanced graphing calculators since then, with better symbolic math capabilities, though the development since the late Eighties feels linear, incremental, not explosive as it has been with other portable computer-ish devices. Certainly graphing calcs have become a must for high-school math students, with the usual controversy that accompanies any change in education. Those Eighties HPs were among the earliest of the genre.

Meanwhile, the basic four-function-with-memory pocket calculators, after becoming essentially disposable drugstore-rack items, have started to vanish since the ability to do simple calculations is a universal feature of cell phones. Everything gets sucked into cell phones eventually.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Oh, yes, I had one of those Sharp BASIC "Pocket Computer"s, too -- my father bought it at a yard sale in 1984 or 1985. I still have it, though the batteries are long dead, and the AC adaptor for the base/printer unit has gone missing.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

I still have my 48G, but haven't turned it on in over a year (and hadn't used it several years before that.)

Seems like everything I need to do is handled easily enough by "Win-R, calc" or Excel these days.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

Through most of high school I used my Mom's HP11C:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp11c.htm

At least, I'm pretty sure it was the 11C, but I won't swear that it wasn't one of the other blue/orange shift key models.

At some point I eventually dropped my backpack in such a way as to shatter the display (or otherwise break something) and it was a sad day indeed, though my Mom didn't really seem to care much.

Having an RPN/stack calculator ruled for high school Chemistry problem sets; while everyone else was laboriously keying in equations into the "big blue" TIs, parenthesis and everything, I was just flying through terms.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

For years I'd reflexively start entering RPN expressions into standard calculators.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Lots of my fellow grad students used either the 11C or 15C, or something like it. Those horizontal-format RPN calcs were elegant little calculators--not as fabulously complex as the alphanumeric programmables, but with a lot of simply accessed power in them.

I think some of those models are either still sold today, or were until very recently. The 12C is a long-time hit with B-school types.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

As a sneaky bonus, having an RPN meant that after the first time, no one ever asked to borrow your calculator again.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, people THOUGHT that when they lent their HPs to ME.