Pocket Calculator Thread

[droodzilla]

Something a bit different, prompted by laying eyes on this beauty:

SwissMicros Model DM32 RPN Calculator

The DM32 is our enhanced classic all-rounder based on the HP 32SII. 171 functions, of which 75 are directly accessible from the keypad. Programmable. Conversions, statistics, fractions, equations, solver and more. The perfect choice for almost everybody. BETA firmware installed, updates will be...

www.swissmicros.com

Swiss engineering, high precision calculation and reverse Polish notation. Phwoaaarrrr!!

Seriously, I used to love mucking around with programmable calculators as a nerdy teenager and other kids liked playing (e.g.) my primitive version of Blackjack against a cunning electronic adversary.

Another thing that reminded me of those days is finding this rather niche item in one of those little local book-swap boxes:

Pocket Calculator Game Book By Edwin Schlossberg | Used | 9780552980050 | World of Books

Buy Pocket Calculator Game Book: No. 1 By Edwin Schlossberg. Available in used condition with free delivery in the UK. ISBN: 9780552980050. ISBN-10: 0552980056

www.wob.com

I owned this very book as a teenager, so I couldn't resist swapping something for it. Flipping through it, I'm pleased to see that the games are as boring as I remember them being.

Anyway, feel free to share your memories, recommendations, etc. Surely I am not alone in loving these things?

PS: Will leave it to someone else to post the relevant Kraftwerk tracks.

 

[gintonic]

gimme a Casio

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

710 77345
710 0553

anybody else remember these?

 

[martin clark]

Like perhaps quite a few here, I went through O and A Levels (Math & Further Maths, Physics etc) with a Casio Fx-82. Brilliant thing!
That eventually got replaced by this monster, which I bought new in 1995, 1500miles east of Singapore. It gets used most days; yet I have never replaced the batteries!

I still have the printed manual - A5-format, and about 13mm thick.

PS @Sue Pertwee-Tyr : 5318008.

 

[Marchbanks]

Like perhaps quite a few here, I went through O and A Levels (Math & Further Maths, Physics etc) with a Casio Fx-82.

Harumph. You Young Folk… in my day… log tables… etc…

I did get a TI something-or-other at university though, around 1975.

Found it! An SR-10.

 

[martin clark]

I have both Log tables (five figs, no less), and a slide-rule, too...

Fun, no?

 

[droodzilla]

gimme a Casio

Aye, I use an FX-991EX for my day job. Great workhorse that does pretty much everything.

Might be fun to muck about with a programmable again someday, when I have more time.

 

[Marchbanks]

I have both Log tables (five figs, no less), and a slide-rule, too...

Fun, no?

I’ve still got my book of logs and trigs, but I always felt slide-rules were for showing off. And that reverse Polish was for masochistic show-offs.

 

[martin clark]

Ah:

No Fun +

 

[Bob McC]

When I did A levels slide rules and log tables were all we had…

 

[Seeker_UK]

710 77345
710 0553

anybody else remember these?

55378008

 

[Seeker_UK]

I think I have one of these lurking at Mum's house somewhere complete with the books.

 

[Tony L]

My two; a 1975 Sinclair Oxford 100, which eats 9V batteries in minutes and has a crazy divide by zero bug, and a late-70s Toshiba BC-1270, which is in regular use. I’ve never been any good at mental arithmetic. I use that for adding up shop orders etc as I really am that bad (especially now post covid). I’ve always relied on calculators to be honest.

 

[mercalia]

I think I have one of these lurking at Mum's house somewhere complete with the books.

ah I had one of those for time until my dad visited them Cambridge/Huntington to demand my money back. At the time old Clive Sinclair was showing some Arab personage around so they quickly gave him the refund and got rid of him as soon as possible. Why you are thinking all this pilava? IT GAVE WRONG TRIG ANSWERS. Yep WRONG ANSWERS. The Trig functions were faulty, I was doing A level maths at the time

 

[Seeker_UK]

ah I had one of those for time until my dad visited them Cambridge/Huntington to demand my money back. At the time old Clive Sinclair was showing some Arab personage around so they quickly gave him the refund and got rid of him as soon as possible. Why you are thinking all this pilava? IT GAVE WRONG TRIG ANSWERS. Yep WRONG ANSWERS. The Trig functions were faulty, I was doing A level maths at the time

A friend of mine is married to someone who used to run Sinclair's customer services department when they were based in St Ives. She has told me more than once that the number of complaints over faulty goods that came though was unbelievable. Just utterly s**t QA and no wonder the business went to the wall.

 

[Joe P]

This is timely.

I recently found my first and second calculator in an old drawer. I had no reason the think either would work, but I put fresh batteries in both — two AAs in the Casio and four button cells in the Sharp — and they still work.

The oldest (a Casio CP-801C) was a Christmas gift I got when in Grade 5 and dates to 1975, give or take. The cool-ass blue-green fluorescent numbers still light up just fine.

The second calculator (a Sharp CT-550), which is also a clock, day-date thingy and stopwatch, was a combo birthday and Christmas gift from the entire family a year later. I seem to recall its being around $50 then, so a bazillion dollars in today's money. I wanted it so badly because it flipped open like a communicator and would beep when the stopwatch hit zero in countdown mode.

To round it out is an HP-42S, a programmable RPN calculator that got me through a couple of science degrees.

It will let you know if you've created a black hole and it can work with complex numbers, which is kinda neat. It also has a guzinta button -- e.g., 3 guzinta 12 four times.

Joe

 

[Somafunk]

Calculator?, Pah! - all us kool kids use a Curta

Always wanted an Curta after I had a play on one, very satisfying to use but obviously not exactly practical, wonderful bit of engineering though.

 

[Rico]

I had a cool compact Casio scientific. Made a suede case, busted the screen with the snap closure. D'oh! Then scored a Casio FX-990 Solar (or was it an FX-880?) when all my mates were using original FX-82. It was a slim calculator in a wallet, was very trick. Oh, one friend was using HP10C with RPN - wow, more efficient as well as nerd cool! There's an FX-880 on ebay asking over $3k!? Madness.
A few years later I was studying electronics and telecommunications at polytech, found my trusty FX-990 was giving wrong answers. Tested it against a couple of classmates, sure enough, it was faulty. I bought a modern HP27S, it was the bomb. Programable - or at least solved expressions and held them in the memory. Assignable buttons as part of the formula, lovely display, and no RPN to get my head around. I've since picked up an HP12C Business calculator, and a 14B (may have been a 17B, I forget), though I've never really used them much. I haven't used the 27S in decades. These are now languishing in a drawer somewhere.

 

[slavedata]

I still have my Slide Rule some things you can't throw away.

 

[PaulMB]

I've got 2 or 3 slide rules and use them regularly, although only for multiplication and division. Very good for working out exchange rates, dilutions of photographic chemicals, square meters, etc.