It's coming...
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
Not one 17ing student taking classes in McCool 84-88 could have operated that damned machine.
HP calculators were the equivalent of trying to read Cuneiform to us TI users. Those that used them however sweared they were the best thing ever.
I can't operate any other sort of graphic calculator. I have multiple HP34 emulators on my phone for when I need to do real math.
I'll see your crappy TI calculator and raise you:
TI built awesome scientific calculators. I should have worn mine out during the late 90's, but it still works today.
Call me when we are stepping up to this bad boy...
As a HS freshmen our Algebra 1 teacher was pregnant. So, for the last few weeks of the year we had a sub. I, and a co-conspirator, convinced this sub that she would let us use the graphing calculators in the cabinet for exams...and we all had one for the final.
Stored a lot of formulas in this sweetheart. Saved my *** in those Econ classes that didn't have mandatory attendance.
This is admittedly a nerd story, but I have an HP 48GX I got as a freshman at Hinds in 1994, and I used it all the way through school and continued to use it at work heavily for years and years. The way the guts of those are designed, there's two circuit boards inside that contact each other with some sort of unsoldered connection as I gather, and there's some foam pieces that provide support for the circuit boards that maintains that connection. After a couple of decades of use, that foam starts to wear out and the two boards don't maintain that connection as well, and how that manifests is the calculator won't turn on, unless you squeeze the case at a certain point on the left side to make that connection, and after that it works fine. So I had been dealing with this issue for a few years, getting along with it, had a couple pixels in the display go bad over the years, but of course HP doesn't make them anymore and getting a replacement or a repair wasn't ever going to be feasible.
So this goes on for a while, and to bring this back to sports, the 2019 season is coming up and MSU is going to head to Tennessee that fall. Well my dad's only sibling lives in Kingsport so a UT game can be an opportunity to go see my one paternal uncle. He's a retired polymer chemist (from Ole Miss) who worked at Eastman forever. I'm talking to him on the phone one day about anything and everything in advance of that trip and somehow the calculator thing comes up. He says wait, what model calculator is it, and I tell him, and he said hold on a minute. Goes off for a couple minutes, and comes back and he tells me he has the exact same model, brand new about 20 years old, never really used, and I can get it when I come see him.
So October comes, we head to Knoxville, Joe Moorhead chokes away what little support he had left, and afterwards we went to Kingsport and I came home with a sparkling new exact same calculator as I had before, which should last me the remainder of my career. Did the little infrared transfer deal and copied the old over to the new, and good to go.
Sweet! I stepped up to the GX at some point, and in geek fashion, added the EE module to it. I still have it, and use it sparingly. It being RPN, there is a zero % chance of any normal person taking it...
I still got this baby that took me through college. I almost never used it for work so my son has been using it in high school. He finally upgraded a few weeks ago and it’s back in my possession again
As tight as my parents were I couldn't believe they bought me an HP45 at around 400 bucks in 1974. My father (an engineer) also bought me a nice K&E slide rule w/leather case and a Hudson's Manual for graduation and off to State I went.
Never learned how to use the slide rule as that was about the tipping point from it to 100% calculator and I don't recall anyone using a slide rule in my classes.
RPN took a little getting use to but once you did, as you say your mind gets wired that makes using a TI/standard tough. Have to say though, after all the years using standard ones, I'd have to think a bit before I could use an HP these days.
I tried not to pull that bad boy out too much back in my engineering school days. There is only so much poon one man can handle
Dear Lord we have entered calculator-smack on this message board.
Actually the exact opposite
I have two 12c's on my desk right this very second. One of them is a platinum, by the way. I'm kind of a big deal.
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