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One day I came across it and started noodling. He never opened the box and it sat in his office for weeks. Dad bought what turned out to be an HP-65 programmable calculator, thinking it might come handy for something. At some point a relative who was also an engineer was moving out of the country and was selling off his extra stuff.
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The job was pretty repetitive once I figured out how to run the formulae using a slide-rule. My dad hired me when I was 14 to help with an engineering project that required calculating thousands of structural tolerances. I felt that I had been cheated but I wasn't really mad about it because I loved these calculators so much. Remember this SETI program that used people's idle CPU's to scan sky pictures? I felt HP calculators had been pulling the same trick by borrowing your brain to calculate their expressions. It works well enough for simple expressions but doesn't really scale very far beyond that. Years later, I started realizing that the reason why these calculators do take fewer keypresses to make calculations is because they borrow your brain to assist them.įor example, you see `3 * (2 + 4)` and your brain has to identify the most nested parenthesis expression, type that in and work your way out. I loved it and spent hours hacking on it (and also secretly enjoyed the fact that nobody borrowed it since hardly anyone knew how to use it). I was one of these smug HP calculator owners back in high school and college. Once you got the hang of it, you would never want to go back to an infix calculator > The magic is the automatic saving of subexpressions on a stack. Anyway, I always wondered what happened in the intervening time that no one seems to use them anymore. Of course I had the Math Module that you could plug in and the magnet card reader. I remember writing a program to get the bird to fly backwards. When a program was running, a little "bird" glyph would "fly" flom left to right across the LCD screen. I have the HP41C app on my iPhone, but you miss the beautiful haptic feedback keys that the HP calc's had.Īctually, the very first programming course I ever took was a 2 credit course called "Programming Calculators" and we learned to program to the HP41. Once you got the hang of it, you would never want to go back to an infix calculator. The magic is the automatic saving of subexpressions on a stack. What happened? When I used to teach, I would write a large expression on the board and challenge students to a calculator duel - me using my 1985 HP41CX and them using their lumbering infix calculator. Now I don't see any of the students using them. I still have my HP41CX that my dad bought me in 1985. You were at a distinct disadvantage on an exam if you had an infix calculator. When I started college in 1985, every Physics student had an HP41C.