My personal calculator history

[naddy]

I thought I'd share my personal calculator history.

I probably had contact with simple four-function calculators before, but my first real scientific calculator, back when I was in school in the 1980s, was a Sharp EL-512. My dad used one at work and he also got one at home and one for me. In fact, a couple I inherited are still floating around the house. Objectively this is a fine machine, contemporary to and in competition with the HP-11C, but nowadays I find the keys too small and fiddly.

A bit later I got a Casio fx-7000G. However, the graphing feature didn't prove all that useful and felt more like a toy. Presumably I sold it, I don't even remember.

Around that time, 1987/88, I also encountered my first RPN calculator. I'm pretty sure I had heard of RPN in one of those articles about Forth that computer magazines ran at the time, but it hadn't piqued any interest. My memory is very hazy, I think a classmate had an HP-11C, so I was curious how it worked, played around with it, and immediately liked it. Since I couldn't always hog my friend's calculator, I got one for myself, an HP-15C. This machine carried me through the later years of school and it has continously served me right up to the present.

I also got an HP-28C but the clamshell design was big and clusmy and I never really warmed up to the machine. I must have eventually sold it, ...

... and got an HP-48SX. I warmed up even less to that one. I don't think I even managed to finish reading all the copious documentation I had bought with it. It was too big, but my overriding memory is how slow it was. The user interface was slow and the vaunted equation writer was unusable. Clearly the designers' ambition had exceeded the capabilities of the hardware. I wanted to use it, but in practice the 15C was sufficient and a lot more convenient, so the 48SX landed on the shelf. I intended to eventually get back to it, but the years passed, and when I barely remembered anything about it, I finally sold it off. The buyer was very happy to get one in such excellent condition.

Meanwhile at university the policy was that no programmable calculators were allowed in exams. So I bought a TI-30X, which served in a pinch. I recently found it again in the back of a drawer and was promptly so disgusted by its wobbly rubber keys that I threw it away.

Sometime in the 1990s I also had an HP-16C. Those had already been discontinued, but I think somebody stumbled over an unsold batch in a warehouse and flogged them off? Anyway, this seemed like a nobrainer, since I was doing computer stuff, including bit-fiddling, all the time. Or so I thought. In practice, the 16C ended up in the drawer, and it was hardly worth taking it out. I can't tell why exactly, but I think it came down to the fact that I hardly ever needed to do the calculations it supported. DEC↔HEX, yes, but for that I can use dc(1) without having to take my hands off the computer keyboard. And once you have a hex number, you can do masking and bit operations in your head—I mean, I know the bit representations of all hex nibbles. So, yeah, you guessed it, I eventually sold the 16C, too.

There is a long gap, where I had stopped following calculators. Eventually my 15C developed a small, annoying defect—two segments on the fifth digit are dead—but brief looks at repair reports on the net looked daunting. I might have bought a 15C LE, but I didn't even learn of its existence until years later.

A few months ago, I stumbled over the HP-15C Collector's Edition and immediately bought one. I used the opportunity to read the HP-15C Owner's Handbook for the first time in decades and the Advanced Functions Handbook for the first time ever. I also studied the MoHPC site and many old forum threads to catch up and get a better understanding of the various Hewlett Packard calculators and belatedly learned about the existence of SwissMicros.

Finally, I recently picked up a used HP-11C in good condition. That one went downstairs into a drawer, so I can do the odd quick calculation on a familiar machine there and don't have to fiddle with an EL-512. I considered a 15C (CE), but an original 11C was cheaper and good enough.

I have been and continue to be tempted to find one of the Pioneer models (32S, 32SII, 42S), but I don't need another calculator and a little voice of reason tells me, given the ample precedent, that after a playthrough of the manuals, the machine would likely just end up on the shelf again...

To be continued.