Recent searches
Search options
I've been reminiscing a lot about calculators lately. I started learning math just when electronic scientific calculators were replacing slide rules as tools for engineers.
But scientific calculators are themselves almost extinct outside of the classroom, because computers, smartphones and tablets running powerful CAS or numerical software can do all the kinds of computing you really need... unless you're not allowed to use them because of classroom or exam restrictions.
So the market has contracted to education, and the high-end calculators sold today, though they're extremely powerful, are very much catering to students rather than to engineers or scientists. There's a lot of power siloed into user-friendly apps, but less ability to link those together into powerful custom-built systems of your own design.
And inevitably, because I'm getting old, I have a lot of nostalgia for old ones... particularly for HP's RPL line, starting in the late 1980s with the 28C (which was woefully underpowered, but the potential was there) and continuing through the very capable 28S and 48/49/50 series.
The ones I actually had were the 28S and the 48SX--the latter got stolen after just a few years; it was too damned expensive to leave lying around. I still have the 28S somewhere though the batteries for it can be hard to find. But I've been getting back into messing with them through emulation. Here's Calculator Culture's review of the 48SX that goes through its innovations, strengths and weaknesses.
@mattmcirvin I have a 48s still in the lab, and I introduce it to every student who sets foot in it, just to encourage them to think differently. Unfortunately it is getting a bit on in years and sometimes doing normal calculations it just beeps and crashes. But I find it so convenient to use that I’m keeping my eyes peeled for a modern alternative, ideally with the same nice solid tactile button feel.
@doc At the moment, there isn't a true modern alternative that is a physical calculator. The RPL line died with the 50g. The HP Prime has a simpler RPN mode but that's not its main focus, and there's also the HP35s which is a sort of nostalgic exercise implementing the old-school RPN. HP isn't really HP any more-- their calculators are made by Kinpo Electronics, a Taiwanese company, under license.
There's a company called Swiss Micros that makes these sort of tributes to old HP calculators (rather pricey ones) and its software guy seems to be trying to revive RPL in some super-ambitious new-generation form. I don't have a feel for how likely it is to result in a usable product.
@mattmcirvin thanks for the insight, it’s unfortunate to know the line has all but dried up. I see the occasional 35s on Amazon but haven’t gotten one yet.
Ah well, I guess we got to change with the times.
@doc
The 50g isn't that old (made from about 2006-2015) so used ones in good shape may be readily available. It actually defaulted to an algebraic mode but when you switch it to RPN, it seems like a worthy successor to the 48 albeit with a pretty different keyboard layout.
Phone apps are your easiest way to experience these machines today, but they don't have that tactile reality.
@mattmcirvin thanks for the tip. Are the buttons on the 50g any decent?
@doc I don't really know since I haven't handled a real one! I heard bad things about the keyboard on the 49, its lower-end counterpart.
@mattmcirvin @doc after our conversation I couldn’t help but pick this one up at a second hand store they also had a 17s but this one looked cooler 
@doc The amazing thing about the 12c is that it's the one RPN model that has stayed in production essentially externally unchanged *to this day*, because it became a near-universal standard for time-value-of-money calculations and such in the financial industry.
The version they sell now is using a modern processor on the inside, so it's much faster but the battery life may not be as good. HP doesn't even make their own calculators any more, but apparently it's a good emulation of the original.
@doc Back in the 80s-90s, I remember some of my friends carried one or the other of the scientific counterparts of this model (the 10c, 11c or 15c). I always liked the physical layout.
The same line had a programmer's calculator, the 16c, which specialized in bit-twiddling operations with any desired word size. I just saw a video of someone demonstrating that one and realized I could have gotten a lot of use out of it in the late 1990s-early 2000s. The calculator I did have *could* do those operations but didn't foreground them in the same convenient way.