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Pocket Calculator Thread

Thanks for reminding me…

RJohan said:
Casio wrist watch calculator
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Nice and light for cycling; handy for calculating W/kg and VAM or something, ofc…

IMG-1196.jpg


Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Fünf, sechs, sieben, acht
One two…
 
JensenHealey said:
I have a TI-85 graphing programmable calculator still in my office drawer - not likely to be able to remember how to use it.

I did have it loaded up with work relevant programs back in the day - the graphing was not needed.

I always had the latest and greatest TI that I could afford when I was at uni in 75-78. A few mates were rich enough to have HP jobbies.

I seem to remember buying one calculator for about £80 - which was a lot of wedge when my weekly living budget was about £30! But it got me through a stats exam that I would have struggled with otherwise - the powers had not caught up with the fact that some calculators could do stats!
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Same, had a Sharp that had all the stats functionality built in, aced the exam as did a few others, following year they‘d caught on, guess a few 100% scores gave that game away.
 
droodzilla said:
Just before going to university, I bought myself this monster:


which looked impressive (or so I thought) but wasn't terribly practical.
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I had the smaller Fx-602P AND used the tape interface to save my programs ! I used it to do fin loading calculations for my MSc thesis amongst other stuff and when my original one started to loose pixels I bought another which I still use as my daily calculator. Much easier to use than that RPN nonsense and the buttons are easier on the fingers compared to the HP stuff.

CHE
 
Amber Audio said:
Same, had a Sharp that had all the stats functionality built in, aced the exam as did a few others, following year they‘d caught on, guess a few 100% scores gave that game away.
Click to expand...

You were lucky, we had to have a decent calculator for the course, my old Sinclair Scientific wasn't adequate any more.
 

Here’s a video of the Sinclair 100 endless loop if you divide by zero. It doesn’t quite capture how beautiful the display is. This is a really cool looking calculator, there’s a 3d aspect to it too, the numerals are set far deeper than one would expect and seem to be in tubes.
 
CHE said:
I had the smaller Fx-602P AND used the tape interface to save my programs ! I used it to do fin loading calculations for my MSc thesis amongst other stuff and when my original one started to loose pixels I bought another which I still use as my daily calculator. Much easier to use than that RPN nonsense and the buttons are easier on the fingers compared to the HP stuff.

CHE
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We were allowed to use calculators in the last year of high school (7th form in NZ, or Upper 6th for the heptally challenged brits) and I got a FX-602P for a birthday present - great calculator which I still have today (along with the tape interface). Although I was very jealous of a friend who had an HP41CV.
 

The Museum of HP Calculators

The Museum of HP Calculators displays and describes older Hewlett-Packard calculators. There are also sections on calculating machines and slide rules as well as sections for buying and selling HP calculators, an HP timeline, collecting information and a software library.
www.hpmuseum.org
 
droodzilla said:
Yes, HP, especially the programmable models, were the calculators that every geek aspired to own, so I'm not surprised there's a market for them now.

I could never afford one but, for a long time, I had a chunky Casio effort that was trying to emulate the HP experience (no RPN though!).

Just before going to university, I bought myself this monster:


which looked impressive (or so I thought) but wasn't terribly practical.
Click to expand...
My pal (and fellow drop-out) on our Mechanical Engineering course had one of those.

I remember a "game" he programmed on it which involved an imaginary space capsule returning to earth, descending vertically, with limited fuel, and you had to enter in the amount of retro-thrust "burn", in a series of attempts, in order to bring it to zero velocity just as it touched down.
After each attempt, the screen would display the resulting velocity (up or down), altitude and amount of fuel left. I always crashed it into the ground, having squandered all the fuel too early.
 
wulbert said:
My pal (and fellow drop-out) on our Mechanical Engineering course had one of those.

I remember a "game" he programmed on it which involved an imaginary space capsule returning to earth, descending vertically, with limited fuel, and you had to enter in the amount of retro-thrust "burn", in a series of attempts, in order to bring it to zero velocity just as it touched down.
After each attempt, the screen would display the resulting velocity (up or down), altitude and amount of fuel left. I always crashed it into the ground, having squandered all the fuel too early.
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Haha, that old chestnut! I remember the game, but I can't remember which device I played it on.

Despite looking impressive, I never found the FX-702P very practical.

And it became redundant a year after I started university when I changed subject from physics to philosophy.
 
Back around 1981 one of the brightest in our class had the most ludicrously complicated Texas Instrument (I think) scientific / programmable calculator. We somehow found out if you entered (if memory serves) 84, ERF(x) The thing went into some near infinite calculation that locked up his calculator for at least 30 minutes. It was fun at the time if we managed to grab it from his desk and do this just before a maths test where calculators were needed.
 
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Many years ago, I bought a version one down from the top model (T.I. I think). It just lacked two or three buttons on the top row and these were functions I couldn't see myself needing.

A few years later the fascia peeled off - revealing the missing functions, just blanked off and, necessarily, missing their rubber activation buttons.
 
Many years ago I was a postgrad with 24/7 access to the college mainframe suite. We had an ICL 2900 of some sort and decided to upgrade it. I watched the engineer at work, after shutdown he opened up the main CPU cabinet and sat down on a stool and read his paper, then he looked at a book from his case, unlocked a service only panel, flicked a couple of switches, locked everything up and asked the operators to boot the system so he could run commissioning tests.

Still have my HP-16C and use i41CX+ on my iPhone. Bought a slide rule from ebay a while ago, would love a Curta but never going to pay what people are asking.

Edit: having said that I checked on actual auction houses and they come up and get sold for less than £1000, one went for £400.
 
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I remember the day I bought my Casio FX-100, a cold rainy saturday morning, from Boots in Sunderland. That was 1985. It served me through O levels, to the end of my Mech Eng degree. In those days I used it like a touch typist, the muscle memory is still there, though not the speed. I find myself hitting the right functions without looking at the button legends to this day.

The original Casio (turquoise and silver) branded batteries were changed around 2010, butenyl because I thought they had to pack up sometime and I didnt want it to be at work where I had no spares. I think those batteries would have outlast me. And they never leaked, how is that given today's batteries leak so readily?

I bought an identical spare from eBay, I will never develop muscle memory for a new calculator now, best to stick with what I know.
 
I had a chief accountant at my business for a good few years who used a manky old basic casio kept in his pocket. His muscle memory was startling - I would never seem him look at the keys as he run down a long column of numbers. I never saw a mistake. In boardroom he would have the calculator on the table in front of him, punching in stuff without eye contact as he was looking at the presentations.
 
As we all know the most important measure of a calculator was how quickly it managed to do 69! About 1 second on the cheapest school calculators these days...
 
JensenHealey said:
I had a chief accountant at my business for a good few years who used a manky old basic casio kept in his pocket. His muscle memory was startling - I would never seem him look at the keys as he run down a long column of numbers. I never saw a mistake. In boardroom he would have the calculator on the table in front of him, punching in stuff without eye contact as he was looking at the presentations.
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I remember the insurance agent visiting the farm to review our cover and being amazed and envious as she "touch typed" on her calculator.
 
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