HP Calculators

[SUPER432]

They don't make em like they used to (though the 35s on the left is brand new and still in production).

Anyone else have old HP RPN calculators lying around that they've been using for many many years?

[huha]

I can use one at home, but it's not mine, so: No, I don't.
But they're still absolutely fantastic calculators with a great keyboard. And RPN is quite fast, too. I'd really love to have the HP41 that's being used at home, but well, it's not mine and if I took it, someone else would be quite unhappy

-huha

[dougy]

God only knows how long......
a 15c on my work bench, a 16c at my desk, a 48sx out in the field and finally a 32s on the counter at the farm for whatever. The 15 and 16 are by far the nicest, with a brushed metal bezel.

[SUPER432]

If I could afford 15c or any from that generation (other than financial 12c) I would grab it.  I personally like the horizontal layout more than the vertical.

And like you said they're built like tanks.

[bhtooefr]

I've got an HP 50g... so nothing old. But, it's a nice calc. I mainly use it as a long-stack scientific, though.

[o2dazone]

I played Dope Wars on my TI82 while in college...thats about all I have to contribute to this sorry

[DarthShrine]

I have the HP 35s too. I much prefer RPN input over the algebraic I had to use with previous calculators.

[Hak Foo]

I never got why the TI calculators are so dominant in the schools.

The HP ones with RPN are definitely nice if you approach math that way.

The Casio ones are cheaper for comparable functionality (often like $70 instead of 130), and offer crude, semi-colour screens.

In school, I had a Casio 9850 (with said semi-colour screen), and it was mildly annoying that the textbook examples never followed my equipment.

[lowpoly]

From the handheld thread:

I have a 48G at home and a 48GX (with MetaKernel and RAM extension) in the office. Both bought new.  Another case of equipment fetishism.

Today, if I need a calculator I use an emulator on my pda.

[itlnstln]

I had an HP 48GX (I think) back in High School.  I loved it.  The way calculations were done on the main screen was a little awkward at first, but after the 5 min. it took to get used to it, it was the only calculator I wanted to use.  I think the MS Power Toy calculator uses a similar "stack" system for countinuous calcs as well.

[bhtooefr]

I never got why the TI calculators are so dominant in the schools.

The HP ones with RPN are definitely nice if you approach math that way.

The Casio ones are cheaper for comparable functionality (often like $70 instead of 130), and offer crude, semi-colour screens.

In school, I had a Casio 9850 (with said semi-colour screen), and it was mildly annoying that the textbook examples never followed my equipment.

Well, TI paid the textbook makers to feature the TI-82 and TI-85 back in the day. And, they trained teachers how to use them, too. So, the textbook says which buttons to press, and the teacher knows what other buttons to press.

Casio was content just selling their calculators cheaply and not training people how to use them, and HP wasn't targeting the educational market at all.

Hence the present situation - a bunch of people trained to mash buttons on TI calcs, and then they don't know how to use other calculators, because all they learned was how to mash buttons, not how to use a calculator as a tool.

[huha]

I never got why the TI calculators are so dominant in the schools.

The HP ones with RPN are definitely nice if you approach math that way.

The Casio ones are cheaper for comparable functionality (often like $70 instead of 130), and offer crude, semi-colour screens.

You're talking about fairly advanced calculators here. In reality, you'll most likely need a calculator with just exp, log, ln, PI as a constant, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos and atan. There should also be several variables to save stuff. A calculation history is really nice, as is the possibility to enter your stuff as a whole without using several steps (but this needs a scrollable display).
You'll have to try hard finding a calculator that doesn't fulfill these requirements.
My somewhat cheap TI can do much, much more than that. I don't even know how certain statistical functions it offers WORK, and I've had it for quite a long time now. My "top of the range" non-graphical non-programmable Casio can do even more than that, but I don't use much of its functionality either. The 9850 I had in school was just crappy and offered extremely slow graphics capabilities, up to the point it became downright silly.

In school, I had a Casio 9850 (with said semi-colour screen), and it was mildly annoying that the textbook examples never followed my equipment.

You have textbook examples with specific calculator instructions? Wow--we didn't have anything like that as far as I can remember. The 9850, however, is an exceptionally bad calculator. I think it was employed by Casio to be as cheap as possible to please the entry-level market for graphical calculators (read: schools. My school bought the calculators and lent them to us). Unluckily, this leads to extremely unpleasant situations, namely the bloody thing being so horribly slow its advanced features hardly are of any use at all. If plotting some graphs takes ages, you'd be better of solving them by your own, maybe with help from the equation solver. But even equation solvers on these devices can be painfully slow (or just a pain to use, with confusing UI, mushy buttons and all), so you'll decide to just do it by hand instead.
This is exactly the point where an advanced calculator becomes utterly useless; if it's barely faster/more comfortable than doing it by hand, you could as well just let it be. I'm not particularily fond of the 9850 for this very reason: It's just a pain to use, so it utterly fails as a tool.


-huha

[keyb_gr]

In reality, you'll most likely need a calculator with just exp, log, ln, PI as a constant, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos and atan.

I'd throw in sqrt, x*10^y / EE, e^x in addition to 10^x (which one did you mean by exp, can be both unfortunately?), x^-1 and the common x^2 for convenience, but basically agreed. Sadly noone seems to be thinking of us poor engineering types and put both Pi and EE on the first level. My Casio can't do engineering notation either, just scientific.

I don't even know how certain statistical functions it offers WORK, and I've had it for quite a long time now.

Ironically, the stats stuff is reputed to be fairly user-friendly on that one.

You have textbook examples with specific calculator instructions? Wow--we didn't have anything like that as far as I can remember.

Thankfully so, I may add. Folks should still be doing a bit of thinking (and operating instructions reading) for themselves.

This is exactly the point where an advanced calculator becomes utterly useless; if it's barely faster/more comfortable than doing it by hand, you could as well just let it be.

Yep. Besides, we have computers for more advanced stuff these days which are more flexible than any calculator could ever hope to be, and frequently we're sitting in front of one anyway. For a quick simple calculation nothing beats a dedicated calculator though.

EDIT:

While we're at it, would anyone be able to recommend a decent Windows-based calculator? Midget comes close to what I'm looking for, but wants some things entered differently than what I'm used to (Pi has to be entered rather awkwardly by Ctrl-P instead of just writing "pi", and the infamous square root isn't sqrt but sqr) and it's shareware that I pretty much wouldn't be able to register w/o getting a Paypal account (something I don't really want to do), besides for this to happen I would need to be very happy with it to begin with.

[wumpyr]

I have the HP 12c platinum in a nice HP 25th anniversary pouch.  Love it.

[ch_123]

I had to write an implementation of an HP RPN calculator in Motorola 68k assembly code for an assignment in college a few months ago. The next day I had a maths exam and attempted to enter in sums in RPN form into my Casio...