How do you like the Woodstock calculators?

[BobVA]

(12-14-2021 04:05 PM)vassilisprevelakis Wrote:  ....Nowadays, programming a LED calculator is a waste of time. Dealing with the numeric encoding of the instructions is a pain, and anyway programs take too long to run. So wasting keyboard real estate for programming instructions (e.g. SST/BST, GTO, GSB etc.) is counter productive...

Point taken but...there's programming and then there's programming :-)

The first case, which I think you've dispatched, is complex numerical programs with no means of saving / restoring programs. These types of programs have minimal input data and large amounts of computation / run time. For that it makes more sense to use a spreadsheet or MATLAB or whatever these days.

But for a quick (say 10-15 step) program that is going to be used on multiple cases of manually entered data, that "program" is really just a way to quickly extend the keyboard functionality.
If I need to, say, convert several dBm settings to watts, then turn a dial on a lab instrument, an on-the-fly / one-off program can be quite a help, and more convenient than setting up a spread sheet on a computer. I still do that sort of thing with with my HP-25 today.