Whenever I found myself out of reach of my HP32-C, I used to use the UNIX RPN desktop calculator 'dc'. However, for engineering, 'dc' gets very awkward with very large or very small numbers. So I made my own and called it 'sdc', for 'scientific desktop calculator'.
'Sdc' is an RPN scientific desktop calculator which understands and prints number in scientific or engineering formats. It's a text input thing, not a GUI. You'd run it in a terminal window. So it will accept 1n or 1e-9 to mean 0.000000001. If you ask it to divide 1M by 1p, it replies 1.000E, that is, 1e18.
It has the usual set of operations you'd expect: The four base operations, normal and hyperbolic trigonometric functions in radians, degrees or grads, exponentials and logarithms, powers and roots and the factorial. You can also define named constants that will be preserved across invocations. It's nice to be able to type c instead of 299.792458M or e0 instead of
8.854187817620394p.Maybe someone else might want to have it too. It's tiny and simple. I packed up the source code, man page and a Linux executable in a tar archive that's about 18kB heavy. You can pick it up at .
Enjoy, Jeroen Belleman