Top three calculators ?

[Steve Simpkin]

(09-06-2024 08:49 PM)Raymond Del Tondo Wrote:  

(05-05-2024 11:27 PM)case2001 Wrote:  I am surprised no one ever mentions the Hp28 series. I enjoy the separate keyboard. There is a nice iOS app rpn28x Calc.

Back then when they were new, I had both, first the 28C, which was a nice technology study due to its limited user RAM of ~1.6K .
Then the 28S, which was way more advanced and *useful* than the 28C.
Actually a graphical demo I made on the 28S, and which I showed to Wilfried Koetz of W&W on the CeBIT fair in 1989,
helped preparing the road as a developer of commercial applications for W&W on the HP 48 for me:-)

On an ergonomic view: If you flip the case halves of a 28C/S, you have two relatively sharply shaped edges in your hand.
Nice idea, but next to the worst ergonomic designs ever made by HP.

The Pioneer Series and so-called stretched Pioneers (aka HP 48)
were much better from an ergonomic point of view.
Except for the awful polarizers of the HP 48S series, of course;-)

I had the HP-28C then the HP-28S as well. I used them at work liked them a lot at the time. I remember reading the HP-28C manual cover-to-cover. It was extremely well written with many examples to introduce you to the new concepts of an unlimited stack, the RPL programming language and much more. I became an RPL convert.

The HP-28C only had 2K of RAM but that was more than enough for dozens of small utility work programs and equations that were listed on a menu by a 4-5 character name. That was a vast improvement over the HP-11C and the HP-28C Solver was also phenomenal. I didn't use the graphing, matrix or symbolic features so the HP-28C had enough memory for my needs. A year later I had bought a used HP-28S. I could now have many dozens of programs and organize them in directories.

As far as ergonomics, I always used it as a folding desktop calculator and it worked great for that. The main reason I eventually switched to the HP-48S was because of the I/O and the vast library of programs becoming available for it via the Goodies Disks (Thank you Joe!), BBS's and Usenet. That was just too compelling an improvement to pass up. I used that HP-48SX as my engineering calculator for over 27 years and it is still the one I grab most often.