Calculators you regret buying?

[cjsuk]

I'm having a mental health crisis when it comes to reading this thread. I have fond memories of nearly all the calculators I owned over the years, which is very many indeed, but I have found one thing out. Every time I buy one to rekindle that memory I wonder how I liked the infernal thing and want to get rid of it nearly immediately. Instant regret every time.

This was apparent, and sorry to kick the RPL comments along further, when I bought a 50G a while ago to rekindle the 48G memories when I was doing my engineering degree. I found out that it was horrible to use, lagged out occasionally and completely missing stuff I needed. The thing that killed me were median and quartile functions for a list of values which is annoyingly missing from the core functionality. This took me hours of wound-salting level pain to kick out in RPL. This should not be a problem as I'm fairly well versed in Lisp and C. The big thing was within a few hours of me putting it down I couldn't remember how to use half of it again. So the first regret is the 50G. Because you have to bring your iPad with you so you can look at the manual every two minutes.

The second regret is the HP 35S which I had. This was one of the faulty ones that chewed up batteries in record time. It was always strategically dead when I needed it.

Anyway I dumped both of these on some poor masochist on eBay and bought an HP Prime which is mostly pretty excellent. As a dumb end user I haven't tried doing any programming on it really because it has the functions I need built in. The only problem is the thing, much like the 35S was, is almost always dead.

An earlier regret at school was the purchase of a Casio FX-4000P which had rubbery-ass buttons on it that never registered properly. And the plastic panel over the display kept falling off.

At some point I ended up with a TI-83 as well. Shifted 10^x key. Urgh. That really annoyed me.

I have a 15C Collectors Edition and a 32Sii to. I prefer the 15C for hammering out actual calculations. I may learn to regret the 32Sii yet - the fraction implementation is horrible.

[polbit]

(12-13-2023 08:00 PM)Marco Polo Wrote:  

(12-13-2023 07:26 PM)polbit Wrote:  HP 48SX with upgraded screen, and with the 41CV Emulation ROM and overlay. Problem solved

In my case: 50g at office, 35s in backpack (aka "mobile office"), Emu48 (with my 50g clone) and Plus42 on smartphone and laptop

Interesting. One of these days I'll have to bite the bullet and retrain my muscle memory for the 50G keyboard, it certainly has plenty of advantages.

[Marco Polo]

(12-13-2023 08:55 PM)polbit Wrote:  

(12-13-2023 08:00 PM)Marco Polo Wrote:  In my case: 50g at office, 35s in backpack (aka "mobile office"), Emu48 (with my 50g clone) and Plus42 on smartphone and laptop

Interesting. One of these days I'll have to bite the bullet and retrain my muscle memory for the 50G keyboard, it certainly has plenty of advantages.

Consider that the switch from 48 to 50 was hard for me due to very different keyboard layout and almost total menus revamping.
I definitively (?) switched to 50 after heavy customizing thanks to wide usage of custom menus use and user keys definition (this is, IMHO the real strength of 48/50 series: the capability to be fully customized to user needs).
Anyway, I am slowly reproducing as much as possible my 50 arrangement on a 48gx, but the difference in speed and the lack of the SD card to backup and exchange data with the PC are refraining me.

[Gjermund Skailand]

I have extensively used both HP42s, HP50g and nowadays DM42.
For larger projects I find debugging to be much more effective in RPL provided it is used properly with many small snippets, and building library.
I find System-RPL to be much cleaner than RPL.
It is also easier to break down the main program in small pieces.
For me, RPN quickly turns into "spaghetti".
And on a final note, with HP50g and programming in C it is still much faster than DM42, especially for cases when I don't really need a lot of digits.
BR Gjermund

[Wes Loewer]

I cut my teeth on the 41CX and loved programming it, but when the 28C came out I immediately saw the advantages of such a "next generation" calculator. When my 28C eventually died my move to the 49g+/50g was a natural progression.

I honestly don't understand the criticism of RPL's readability. Yes, it's harder to read than a typical programming language intended for a computer, but for a calculator language it wasn't so bad for its time. Surely RPL is not as hard to read as RPN keystroke programming. Coming from RPN, I do remember feeling like it was "cheating" to use RPL's high level features like local variables, IF-THEN-ELSE, and FOR loops. I found RPL to be incredibly efficient.

With RPL, you could do the stack juggling if you wanted to, or you could use local variables instead for a more readable program. With RPN, you have no choice but to do stack juggling and use global registers, but it's like an elegant dance when you do it right.

People criticize stack juggling, but the experience I gained learning to juggle a stack later proved to be invaluable when I got involved in fractal projects requiring floating point assembly code for the 80x87 with its 8 level RPN-style register stack.

I still love RPL, but these days I find myself coding a lot in PPL for the Prime. (The calculator has its quirks, but my students strongly prefer it over the others.) PPL is easier to read but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for RPL for quick and dirty programs.


And for the record, I have never regretted buying a calculator. I haven't had that many, but each one was like opening a door into Oz.

[lucase]

The TI-58. I saved money to buy it on my first trip to the US while I was on high school. I got a defective one. After that, no more Texas Instruments, ever.

[AnnoyedOne]

A National Semiconductor NS-108 (to replace a TI-30) in 1980. Not bad and had built-in keys for calculating Normal Distribution probabilities. However it only lasted some 9 months due to a mechanical power switch failure. A poor design.

I bought a second hand TI-55 (LED) to replace it. That lasted years until I bought a new HP-15C.

A1

[Peet]

HP 20b - Beautiful design but the worst keyboard I've ever used on a calculator.
HP 35s - The most loveless homage I have ever seen. And I just can't get over the stupid/wrongly printed shift keys.
HP 39gII - It is simply unusable for me. Why the hell did I buy a non-RPN HP calculator?

[Etienne Victoria]

Around 30 years ago : bought a Hp-67. Eeeeeek, key legend below the key !! what were they thinking ??? Thought I could get used to it, hated it on day 2...but kept it.

Today : what a great and elegant machine with so many useful solutions ! I have three of them. Tony's board in one of them. Trains my memory muscle when I use them, alternating with the greatest models (Hp-80, 81, 65, 41CL).

E.

[Ren]

2 calculators I regret buying,
The first was one of those solar powered 4 banger credit card size calcs that were around in the early 1980s.
As it was credit card sized and thickness, I put it in my billfold. "CRUNCH" when I sat down.

The second (I mentioned a few days ago) was a Casio large screen programmable I bought at a hamfest for $10 over 20 years ago. It came with a thick manual. I did not like it, esp. bin/oct/dec/hex conversions and related calculations did not make any sense to me. Sometime after that I think I donated it.