Scientific Calculator

Just a heads up. If you want a calculator in your tool box, it would be hard to beat the price of one from Dollar Tree. Ten digits, 56 functions for a buck. I bought one for my grandson.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster
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In 1972, I got a 90 on a test instead of a 100 because I wasted time with my slip stick. So, I went out and spent $200 on an SR-10, four function plus reciprocal. I remember I had just got a raise from 1.60 all the way to 2.30 so it only took two weeks pay.

Karl

Reply to
Karl Townsend

You are not the only one, Karl.

Sometime, about 1975,76, or so, I was programming for the bank processing division of a computer service bureau. One day the manager of the other half of the company, the non-bank division, asked if I could look at a program one of the programmers was having trouble with. Sure, should take just a little while! Right.

The program had to compute something based on the prime interest rate. If you remember those years, the prime rate began to change twice a month, then weekly, and for a short time, twice a week. The programmer was way over his head, and so was I. I worked on the problem for over a week, using pencil and paper to do the computations, until I finally figured out how to handle all the rate changes properly.

Can you believe in the very following week I got an ad from HP for their new HP-55 programmable calculator? If I had had that thing, I could have solved the programming problem in just a couple of days. The price was $499.99 for the complete set up, so I ordered it.

I never had reason to use it again. I did program a bunch of trivial stuff, but nothing special. I sold it 10 years ago to a collector.

Paul

Reply to
co_farmer

And we bought a 4 banger with reciprocal and memory for (plug in wall) for ... $600. It was pre any TI or HP calcs. I did logs on it and trig. I was a Senior Adjunct Professor teaching 3 classes as a second job. Calc crunching the numbers saved days of hand work. We had some great apps - paper - methods - in EDN or Electronics back then. By the middle 70's I was fully computerized doing histograms. :-)

Mart> >

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

About that time, one of the engineers in regional office somehow managed to get a purchase order issued for one of those. When management discovered what had been purchased, it was decreed that it should be locked in the safe when not in use. In 1977, I got a chance to use it for a couple days and could see that it would be useful my work but it would never be possible for me to take it home and play around with it. I bought a Commodore PR100 with 100 program steps, then, when the TI-59 came out, I got me one. Over the next five years, I used that calculator regularly, then, I got stuck in regional office away from the field and rarely used it and when I did need it, the card reader had packed it in. now I have two of them downstairs complete with printers, and wouldn't have a clue what to do with them.. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Reply to
Gerald Miller

I was a "starving student" in the early '70's, and when I bought my texts for the '72 fall semester and had a look in the heat transfer text, I knew that my slip stick would no longer suffice what with all those fractional indicies calculations.

Went and bought a Digimatic D8 scientific calculator at Sears for $Cdn182. 2 years later when doing extensive statistical calcs (standard deviation calcs are a killer on non-stats machines) the key pad crapped out and Sears replaced it for free. The boss loaned me an HP45 calc and it was the cat's meow for the work at hand; but no way could I justify the $500 or so it cost! One term tuition was around $600 at that time.

I still have the D8 calc and it works fine.

Wolfgang

Reply to
wolfgang

I was a senior in high school in 1975... I'd had my good K&E bamboo slide rule for about a couple of months when the first great price crash for calculators hit. Suddenly a Melcor SC-535 (see

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available for under $100. That calculator got me most of the way through undergrad...

Now, of course, the two calculators I use are a mode in emacs and an application on my phone.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

1982 my parents bought a HP 15C caculator for me as a bithday present. Prof said my old calc wasn't up for my EE classes. It would do matrices, complex number atrithmatic and had a iterive equation solver. Saved me a bunch of time. Three sets of batteris later I used it today. Havent used anything more complex than Y^X in 20 years.

Now I use Mathmatic for almost everything besides numerical simulation where MATLAB rules.

Reply to
toolbreaker

Ah - an Emacs user.

I love the vertical column cut - e.g. the 4th column of numbers cut and put in the second as an insert.

Mart> I was a senior in high school in 1975... I'd had my good K&E bamboo

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

Of all calculators I greatly prefer reverse Polish notation based ones. They are far more powerful and very intuitive too.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus16025

I've always preferred HP's with RPN. I like to bring mine to a meeting and hand it to someone when they need a calculator.

Reply to
ATP

I have an HP that does both. They (the designers) push you towards algebraic notion as a standard. Easier to do some things in it so they say.

I use it in the house and my TI in the shop - my cool HP clam box here in the house. So RPN is in my blood also, but in the ship it is algebra.

Mart> Of all calculators I greatly prefer reverse Polish notation based

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

Both my calculator on my phone and the emacs mode are RPN.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

You are EVIL

Reply to
Ignoramus16025
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Where I worked -- about the same time or a bit earlier, the head honcho of the lab branch where I was got an HP 45 and kept it locked up, letting nobody use it. He claimed that there was no need for any of his people to need one.

About that time they were just below $400.00 -- and I decided to buy one of my own -- with my *own* money.

I kept it on my belt, and took great pleasure in hauling it out in meetings where he was present and answering questions requiring calculation -- quite quickly -- to show how useful it was.

While I keep an HP-15C and an HP-16C (the computer math one) in a belt pouch to this day. Some of these days, they will die and I will not be able to get a replacement. (Apparently, HP has been convinced to continue the HP-10C (business math), but not the scientific or computer ones.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Qedit (for Windows) still does that.

Reply to
CaveLamb

He knows...

Reply to
CaveLamb

Pretty much any HP calculator ever produced is available on eBay... just mention my name and pay cash.

Erik

Reply to
Erik

How long do you think they'll last?. I bought my first HP-11C in 1982 and it's still going. I though it was an expensive purchase at the time when all around me were buying cheap Casios, usually the ones with the extra functions on the flip open cover, but then the cover functions would start to fail within a year IIRC due to flexing I suspect. I started using HPs with my dad's old HP45 when he upgraded to a HP41C so I'll probably be using RPN by choice till I have no other option.

Reply to
David Billington

You're cruel, but then I'm the same. You must be used to the strange expression and the usual "where is the equals key" or sometimes "how do I turn it off" as it only has an on button. I lost mine once and it got returned so I went to thank the technician at the college that had turned it in, he said he would have kept it if they could have figured out how to work it as it looks like a real nice calculator.

Reply to
David Billington

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