In another post I mentioned some nostalgic feelings for calculators and how the scientific calculator seems to have become an endangered species. Who needs a calculator nowadays when you can get apps for your smartphone to do ‘mostly’ the same ? Well, I don’t know if you noticed this but even on a modern ‘phablet’ there always seems to be little space left once the buttons for the digits and the operations have been added to a calculator screen. On the old scientific calculators much more fitted on roughly the same surface area. It must be that calculators had real buttons like a keyboard sticking out of the surface a bit making it easier to make them smaller and still useable. On a screen that isn’t practicle, you would simply end up pressing 9 buttons simultaneously. Anyway, in terms of tactile response and surface area a real calculator beats an app hands down. The way these apps work seem to be very unsatisfactory even for standard users. While making homework last week my 16 year old daughter suddenly exclaimed ‘the calculator app on my phone sucks’ and she went through the trouble to go upstairs to get her calculator to finish her homework.
As a follower of the RPN school I am a user of HP calculators in particular. But I didn’t start out that way. Like many kids in those days I started with a very simple calculator which was more a toy. A small device about the size of a modern card reader which could do basic math and had a memory function. Then, at around 13 I got my first calculator for school. Back then, like today the most widely used brand at school was Casio. Now schools have a calculator in the package together with the books so that everyone has the same type and exercises can be tailored to the particular functions of the model. I was ‘lucky’ as we lived in calculator anarchy at school : you could pick any brand. I started out with Casio, I think it was a fx100 
but I’m not entirely sure, then found out through a friend that engineers at Bell were using TIs. Those were really impressive at the time, programmable and all. I didn’t get one of those but my dad bought me an HP15C 
. This started me on the RPN path. It needed some getting used to but soon I was a convert. The 15C model became quite iconic. My original one from the eighties is gone but roughly 10 years ago I bought a numbered special edition ‘remake’ for a ridiculous price. That one I still have ready on my desk at home. Next I got a 28S clamshell 
with multi line LCD and graphing capabilities.
When that one broke down I got a HP49s 
and now I have a HP50g
. I recently realised I need to take good care of it as I will never be able to replace it.
As a backup I got myself a HP Prime 
recently but I still have to play around with it a bit to see if this is really a potential replacement. I also discovered that there is a company called Swiss Micros that sells calculators based on the HP 48s. I am planning to check that out as well. And long term hobby project is to program my own HP RPN calculator. One day …
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