Your First Handheld?

[walter b]

(05-14-2014 09:42 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  

(05-14-2014 09:30 PM)walter b Wrote:  Hmmh, what count a couple of years on a cosmic background?

...said Walter the nitpicker...

Lasciate ogni speranza ... sera Massimo infernale

d;-)

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(05-15-2014 04:32 AM)walter b Wrote:  

(05-14-2014 09:42 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  ...said Walter the nitpicker... :D :p :D

Lasciate ogni speranza ... sera Massimo infernale :s

d;-)

Sorry Walter, I owe you a beer! :)

[walter b]

(05-15-2014 06:15 AM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  

(05-15-2014 04:32 AM)walter b Wrote:  Lasciate ogni speranza ... sera Massimo infernale

d;-)

Sorry Walter, I owe you a beer!

Accepted - see you in Allschwil

[d b]

1982, 11c, gave it to a former girlfriend when i got a 41.
dam i miss that calculator.

I bought a "factory seconds" National Semiconductor from the Fremont plant off Central Av. for $5 in about 73 for my dad.
He was impressed.
They had run out of battery doors but the rest was fine and a little duct tape kept the 9v in.

In another story; 5 of us were sitting around drinking beer in '75 and somebody pulled out his shiny new TI. Everyone took turns writing hELL and BOOBIES on it but I could do better. I typed in my last name 0771738. I remember Mitch saying that was lame and all an Italian had to do is randomly bang in sevens, ones and zeros anyway. I bet him a buck i could write my first name too. 514430.

[Katie Wasserman]

(05-16-2014 04:53 AM)Den Belillo (Martinez Ca.) Wrote:  In another story; 5 of us were sitting around drinking beer in '75 and somebody pulled out his shiny new TI. Everyone took turns writing hELL and BOOBIES on it but I could do better. I typed in my last name 0771738. I remember Mitch saying that was lame and all an Italian had to do is randomly bang in sevens, ones and zeros anyway. I bet him a buck i could write my first name too. 514430.

Clearly, you were born to be a calculator geek!

[walter b]

(05-16-2014 04:53 AM)Den Belillo (Martinez Ca.) Wrote:  I bet him a buck i could write my first name too. 514430.

I know crazy first names without limits are legal in the USA, but "Oehhis" ?!?

Comes pretty close to a random letter combination IMHO. Thanks in advance for enligthenment.

d:-?

[Thomas Radtke]

(05-16-2014 07:12 AM)walter b Wrote:  I know crazy first names without limits are legal in the USA, but "Oehhis" ?!?

It's likely Dennis, but doesn't work well on dot matrix LCDs. Too bad I have only my 27S with me.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(05-16-2014 04:53 AM)Den Belillo (Martinez Ca.) Wrote:  In another story; 5 of us were sitting around drinking beer in '75 and somebody pulled out his shiny new TI. Everyone took turns writing hELL and BOOBIES on it but I could do better. I typed in my last name 0771738. I remember Mitch saying that was lame and all an Italian had to do is randomly bang in sevens, ones and zeros anyway. I bet him a buck i could write my first name too. 514430.

Try it with mine...

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(05-16-2014 08:54 AM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  Try it with mine...

Then came her Majesty the 41, see left...

[r. pienne]

Mine was an Addiator (or similar device), bought with my pocket-money in a toy shop. I followed my mother around the supermarket a few times with it, adding up the bill as we went. A handy little gimmick at the time, but it didn't last long, for some reason I can't remember. Later came electronic handhelds and after a few 4-bangers and cheapo scientifics I started lusting after the exotic HPs in the glass cases in my local electronics shop, which I could never hope to afford (or at least justify). It was only much later with the 49g+ (not a great example) that I discovered the beauty of the HP way.

[jbwiebe]

Commodore SR9190R from Sears in 1978 (Grade 11). I knew about and wanted and HP but it wasn't in the budget.
Two interesting facts about this algebraic machine. First, it had a natural log of the gamma function which enabled one to very high factorials. I had not seen this before. Second, I got so tired of friends asking if they could borrow my calculator that I opened it up, removed the keys, and put them back in random order. I knew the keyboard layout well enough to operate in the dark but it was useless to anyone else. From then on no one asked to borrow it more than once!

[cutterjohn]

...well since some people are adding PDAs, my first of those would have been a Palm IIIx, to which I added TRG's XTRA XTRA Pro upgrade(8MB RAM/4MB flash).

Used that for quite a few things, including as what you might call my first ebook reader, emergency serial terminal, had an onboard C compiler, onboard Pascal compiler as well amongst other things.

I still used that thing a fair bit until one day a few years I finally dropped it and cracked the right corner of the screen, but I did buy a replacement that was in fairly decent condition and swapped in the TRG upgrade. Planning on tracking down a replacement screen for mine as my original is practically mint especially compared to the replacement.

If anyone finds the original TRG XTRA XTRA Pro software utilities I'd really like to know as contacting the company that TRG became gets me *silence*...

(Those Palms were quite the beast, so much software and capabilities, color(& 4.0 fw) kind of ruined them though IMO... left my IIIx @ 3.3 fw.)

[Dave Britten]

(05-17-2014 01:27 PM)cutterjohn Wrote:  ...well since some people are adding PDAs, my first of those would have been a Palm IIIx, to which I added TRG's XTRA XTRA Pro upgrade(8MB RAM/4MB flash).

Used that for quite a few things, including as what you might call my first ebook reader, emergency serial terminal, had an onboard C compiler, onboard Pascal compiler as well amongst other things.

I still used that thing a fair bit until one day a few years I finally dropped it and cracked the right corner of the screen, but I did buy a replacement that was in fairly decent condition and swapped in the TRG upgrade. Planning on tracking down a replacement screen for mine as my original is practically mint especially compared to the replacement.

If anyone finds the original TRG XTRA XTRA Pro software utilities I'd really like to know as contacting the company that TRG became gets me *silence*...

(Those Palms were quite the beast, so much software and capabilities, color(& 4.0 fw) kind of ruined them though IMO... left my IIIx @ 3.3 fw.)

Yeah, I got a lot of mileage out of those old Palm handhelds back in the day. I think I started with a Palm Pilot Professional around high school, upgraded it with the board that essentially turned it into a Palm III, replaced it with a IIIx, upgraded THAT with a board that turned it into a IIIxe (8 MB), got a TRGPro (that CF slot was great), then eventually started dabbling in the Clie line and other stuff. The later models never really had the same elegant simplicity as the old ones.

I got a second-hand Palm m500 a few years back, and that one comes pretty close to the simple utility of the old models, but with lots of RAM and an SD slot. I mostly used it for running Pocket Quicken and whatnot.

[HP67]

Agree with Dave. The Palms were all excellent. I still use a few a bit each week.

[Tugdual]

I started with a TI 57. Even passed exams with that... what a fool I was. The battery could hardly last for 1h by the end of the school year, keys were bouncing and pi would become 33333.11111444441111. A nightmare. That year during vacation, I opened it and found a nice RC network that I immediately changed to alter the clock. Was hilarious to torture this poor little thing and when I was fed up testing the various speeds and see its segments blinking like crazy I decided it didn't even deserve to be reassembled. Not sure where it is now. Found one for less than $10 on ebay, so it didn't even get value with time.

The year after I had a 15C. Nice and clear LCD screen, infinite battery life, complex numbers, matrices, solve, integrate, factorial (on non integer values yay excitement, discovering gamma function), linear regression, stats, huge memory (yeah different perspectives by the time), great form factor, very solid design. Took me a very short time to get used to RPN and now I find it hard to use non RPN calculators (like the Prime...). If you ask me, the legendary calculator from Hp is the 15C and I recently purchased the LE. I enjoy it even more for the speed and if the design is inferior to the original one, it remains not bad.

[cutterjohn]

(05-17-2014 03:22 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I got a second-hand Palm m500 a few years back, and that one comes pretty close to the simple utility of the old models, but with lots of RAM and an SD slot. I mostly used it for running Pocket Quicken and whatnot.

Hah! Thanks for reminding me about the m500s. I went to check on screen replacements, which were kind of pricey, so checked m500s and there seem to be a ton of them NIB still kicking around, so $20 and an m500 now.

I added a Handspring Prizm and a Sony Clie to my collection as well when they came, but color screens were just a no go for me. Unreadable in sunlight. Also picked up a Tungsten a few years ago just to have an ARM based Palm & 5.x OS.

I kind of got on a kick on these things for a while and also had the origanl Compaq iPaq(batt kept dying on it though, but it was 1st batch and had a whopping 64MB of flash instead of the 32MB specced had linux running on it).

VTECH Helio, alot like the Palms but the OS wasn't nearly as good but they eventually *gasp* OSSed it when they EOLed the product. (MIPS SoC)

...and lastly an Agenda VR3, the original one w/less RAM/flash. Another MIPS SoC & linux based OS.

...and almost forgot a Casio Cassiopeia wince(and I do, god wince is awful), which reminds me I had a v1 or v2 wince w/a keyboard too, but I forget the make.

Franklin eBookman(16MB/backlit one) weird cross between an ebook reader(1st I bought that was marketed as that) w/PIM functions. (Really it was more like a PDA w/litreader from M$.)

...and the Newton MessagePage 2100 that I picked up in the early 2000s w/a bunch of extras, used that for a while, but it was really just too big.

Then a REB-1100 (B&W LCD one w/MMC cards?) but the it died and I ended back to between the iiix & ebookman as an ereader until I moved to eink.

Also up to misc. tablets, but really only use them occasionally and then only the Nexus 7(2013). They aren't going to replace my notebooks, and my nexus 4 then 5 do everything else that they can do and I always have that w/me. (I REALLY need to STOP buying tablets...)

[Dave Britten]

(05-18-2014 02:46 PM)cutterjohn Wrote:  Also up to misc. tablets, but really only use them occasionally and then only the Nexus 7(2013). They aren't going to replace my notebooks, and my nexus 4 then 5 do everything else that they can do and I always have that w/me. (I REALLY need to STOP buying tablets...)

Tablets have mostly replaced notebooks for me (well, except for the OmniBook 300, naturally) pretty much as soon as I got an iPad. I've still got an Asus for workhorse stuff, but between my iPad, Nexus 7, and Iconia W3, I really don't need to trot it out much, at least for personal stuff. At work, I use a meaty desktop for development/DBAing.

[cutterjohn]

(05-18-2014 04:27 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Tablets have mostly replaced notebooks for me (well, except for the OmniBook 300, naturally) pretty much as soon as I got an iPad. I've still got an Asus for workhorse stuff, but between my iPad, Nexus 7, and Iconia W3, I really don't need to trot it out much, at least for personal stuff. At work, I use a meaty desktop for development/DBAing.

Sager NP-8255S(15.6") & NP-7330(13") for me, I like my beefy dGPUs in my notebooks as iGPUs just don't cut it.

*cough* I have a collection of assorted desktops, and one still waiting to be assembled from components... but my primary desktop is pretty meaty(3930k because I have a microcenter sort of nearby->cheap CPUs but I ended up buying all the components there for that as they had good prices on other items as well(GPU) and so ended up w/tax being about the same as ordering from newegg/amazon/etc. + shipping...)...

Anyways probably should stop our offtopicness...

[Ender]

My first handheld HP was the venerable HP 34C. This was followed a few years later by HP 41CX and then HP 42S. I still have the HP 42S that I bought in 1995 in perfect working condition. I hardly use the calculator now but rely on Thomas Okken's excellent Free42 for all my calculation needs. Given the excellent menu system of HP 42S, I am quite surprised and disappointed to find that there are not many programs written to take advantage of it. I will post some HP 42S programs that I have written on this forum once I get their documentations done properly. Cheers.

[Les Bell]

(05-18-2014 04:27 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Tablets have mostly replaced notebooks for me (well, except for the OmniBook 300, naturally) pretty much as soon as I got an iPad. I've still got an Asus for workhorse stuff, but between my iPad, Nexus 7, and Iconia W3, I really don't need to trot it out much, at least for personal stuff. At work, I use a meaty desktop for development/DBAing.

I've pretty much gone the same way, only exclusively with Android; nothing to do with the design or capability of the devices, so much as the cloud framework behind them. Signed up for Google Apps/Docs for two companies (and the university where I work) and started exploring the Googleverse. Last year I added a Chromebook and use it surprisingly often, but the Nexus 7 remains the generically useful "take everywhere" device. go41cx does everything I need there, unless I want spreadsheet-style numbercrunching.

But, like you, my desktop machine is a 32GB brute that runs Eclipse and other dev tools all day, every day.