Who needs a calculator ?

Somewhere near the end of 2019 I needed a calculator to help our daughter with some math homework. Turns out I had a leaking battery problem and the contacts in the battery compartment had been corroded. After an initial clean and inserting new batteries nothing happened. Afraid that this was maybe beyond repair I quickly looked on amazon if I could still get a new one. Turns out that the HP50G model was no longer being sold. Sure, there were still a few collector items on sale for a mere measly 300 Euro or so. That was a bit much even for me. I don’t mind paying a bit more for a good calculator that has RPN support but 300 Euro is just too much. In the end I could remove the corrosion on the contacts and the calculator is working again but I now realise that if my 50g really dies I will not be able to replace it with a new one. Possibly I will not be able to replace it with anything with similar functionality. All that is left is a market geared towards schools with everyone using a graphing calculator and RPN is not a feature that is high on the list of requirements. I got a HP15C as a present from my dad in the early eighties and have used RPN calculators ever since. Whenever I use a normal calculator because that is what is at hand (can be on a computer or an app as well) I always have to think about the order of calculation, using parentheses, storing in memory and so on. I guess it is a habit but I am used to RPN and prefer to keep using it. But why use a calculator if you have a computer. To start I don’t always want to boot up a computer or open a laptop to add and multiply a few number. If you don’t have a numeric keyboard on your laptop it becomes cumbersome very fast to type in the numbers and find the buttons for the different operations scattered across the keyboard. The number keyboard is always faster than pointing and clicking hundreds of time with the mouse. You can use an app, you say. Indeed, but until now these have not been completely satisfactory. My phone has a 6 inch screen which was gigantic until recently. Still I only get to see the digits and the basic operations on my screen. It looks like you can cram many more buttons and operations onto a calculator of the same size than on an app. I guess with raised buttons, some shift buttons and coloured text above buttons for the shift operations you can have many more operations visible in the same space compared to an app. Of course, if I just need to add up a few numbers an app is fine. But if the number of calculations grows larger and I don’t have a computer at hand then a calculator is always better than an app for me. Of course I am an old guy and I’m sure my kids will not understand why I wouldn’t just use my smartphone for that. Anyway, I started looking into the possibilities a bit more and there are even new rpn calculators being made in Switzerland by swissmicros based on HP models. Astonishing that there is a market for that as being Swiss these calculators are not exactly cheap. It is definitive proof that God loves crazy people, he made so many of them … They have a 15C ‘replica’ and one of the 42S. I might just decide to buy one for fun. Also there are HP emulators that you can run on your computer and some apps and an HP Prime app as well. If everything isn’t “good enough” for me I will probably end up writing my own calculator app in the end. Maybe I’ll do it anyway just for fun.