Favorite calculator

Incwww.highlandtechnology.com  jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Careful there, Robert, You'll offend The Great and Wonderful Oz. ...Jim Thompson

HP41CV.

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

It takes the polish off of your furniture? ;-)

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

That's what killed both my TI59s. Key problems.

Then I got an HP41CV. That took over 25 years to develop problems.

I had fought shy of RPN, then found I actually preferred it when I got an HP.

I still use my old guessing stick, from time to time.

Yup.

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

I think most everyone does/did. I eschewed it, too, at first. Once I understood how it worked, I loved it. A perfect example of the old saying: "Once you go _________(fill in blank), you'll never go back."

nb

Polish Notation puts the operator before the stacked operands; RPN puts it after. Compiler expression evaluators are fundamantally Polish notation machines.

It's called Polish Notation because nobody can pronounce "Jan Lukasiewicz"

he

I agree with Nico - had a graphing Casio that seemed very intuitive to operate. But my favorite was the "EasyCalc" app on my old Palm device. Great scientific calc app with hex/octal/binary/decimal, and graphing, stored functions, very nice. If it could only get ported to Android!

Speaking of which, there is a free HP-41 app for Android - it's what I'm currently using. With all the full computers around, I haven't yet used it enough to be truly proficient with it.

Are these manuals any good?

I haven't looked. These might not go beyond what you've already got.

One way or the other, you've got to remember where you are in the equation. With a single line display, that can be a problem. But the HP-28 series and other dot matrix display models (CRT types as well), you can see (part of) the stack above the working register.

It all depends on whether your mental model of an equation is textual (left to right) or stack based, I suppose.

Better yet:

-- Paul Hovnanian mailto: snipped-for-privacy@Hovnanian.com

------------------------------------------------------------------ Do not mold, findle or sputilate.

I've heard of a few people picking them up at estate sales cheap. Grandpa dies, junior clears out his house and doesn't know what the damned thing is (a pepper grinder?).

I always keep my eyes open for ex-engineer, tech estate sales for good tools and stuff. At one, they had shoveled everything off a guy's workbench into cardboard boxes and sold them for $10 each. I peeked into one and there was a perfectly good Fluke DVM (~ $300 new) sitting right on top.

Original service manual and hand drawn schematics are available here:

Only 2? A bug that didn't affect other roots?

There have been a lot of HP calc emulators for the PC. I still have some DOS examples. If the source for any of them is available then somebody could port it to the PIC.

Bingo!

OTOH, in these hard times, a lotta good stuff goes a'begin'. I tried to sell a Mitutoyo 1"-2" 0.0001 res mic fer whatever on ebay, no min! This was brand new in box, never used. I couldn't give it away.

nb

Best one I found is V41. Comes with all the solutions books as files to load. Unfortunately, although it runs under wine in linux, the LCD font doesn't work properly, believe me, I've tried.

In Windows, which I don't have here, it's superb, though.

Nonpareil, which is said to be very similar, won't compile for me.

Causes bean counters to implode!

I can.

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)