Am I the only one to remember doing this?
The TI 57 was a programmable calculator in the late 1970s, if you had it display a 5, then 54, then 543, etc, you would turn it upside down and 710 77345 read as shell oil.
I believe that trick worked with just about any calculator at that time.
Yes sir, any calculator you could program.
Words you can spell with a calculator:
Thanks but I was playing the OG card.
What is “Playing the OG card”?
I am an original gangster in programming.
Not really, I have programmed a calculator, and a basic stamp, and a Hurco CNC milling machine, but other than that I am completely ignorant about programming.
I was just trying to connect with people who had the same fond memory of high school.
I always made my calculators spell out “hELLhOLE,” since that was what I thought of school, but I’m not sure why you’d need a programmable one?
You pressed a button and then it was displayed like a theater marquis , each letter appears by itself, and then another letter is added, etc, until the whole message is displayed.
5318008
You know what sucks about an iPad , you want to look at something upside down, and it rotates the screen.
( . Y . )
Screen glue will stop that.
Quick controls (swipe down from the top right corner), click the lock icon with the spinning arrow around it. Done, rotation is locked. Useful for reading in bed.
I remember that as part of a story.
“If 142 [group 1] fought 154 [group 2] over 69 oil wells for 5 days, who would win?”
and you’d type in 14215469 and multiply it by 5 to get 71077345.
This was in the 70s and things were really tense in the Middle East, so you can probably guess who the two groups were.
Then there is the 710 cap on your car engine that confuses some people and is a puzzle – or a joke.
The 710 cap on my engine just shows a pictograph* of an “oil can”. None of the kids know what an oil can is…
*pictograph= ‘meaningless in any language’
Just like the 3-1/2" floppy drive = “save”…
Yeah, I played those same games on my TI SR-50 back in the mid 70’s. Booklets on how to do stupid calculator tricks made the rounds back then. They were quite funny for about 3 minutes.
I hadn’t thought of this in about forty years, but the thread title brought back memories of not only ShEllOiL but the other words my brother and I figured out how to produce in the calculator display window.