Calculator Wars at your School

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

At school we went straight from paper and pencil to calculators in 1976 or maybe 1977. The sliderule was completely bypassed. It was only mentioned briefly when the logarithms were introduced in mathematics. The teacher dusted off one of these blackboard-sized demonstration slide rules and showed us how they were used back in their days.

Calculator wise we were allowed to buy what we wanted (or what our parents considered a justifiable expense) and use it in all science classes. This meant that almost every student in my class had a different calculator and interestingly I still remember many of the student<>calculator pairings now, 45 years later. All of them had a luninous display because affordable scientific LCD calculators came only many years later, so it was either LED of fluorescent. Nobody had a calculator from HP (they were crazily expensive in Europe in those years, three or four times as much as all the others) and even later at university, HPs were used by a tiny miniority only. The only HP calculator I ever touched before I became a collector myself was my dad's HP67 (which actually belonged to his employer).

I don't remember any "calculator wars". Just some curiosity regarding what ones class neighbors calculator was able to do which ones own couldn't (e.g. factorials). Later at university we had a "numerical treatment of differential equations" course where either access to a mainframe computer or a programmable calculator was absolutely required. We did some benchmarking among our calculators and my Ti-59, which was maybe three years old then, was dwarfed by the then latest model of Casio, the fx-602P. But I kept to my Ti-59 because after that differntial equations course was finished I never again needed any significant computing power from a pocket calculator.

Regards
Max