I love my HP-48GX. It has a wonderful programming language that is a minimalist, well-thought-out cross between Forth and Lisp. It has a whole library of convenient equations from physics and geometry, including solid-state electronics, optics, stress analysis, and oscillations. It can graph in 2D and 3D in more modes than I know what to do with, including slopefield and parametric. It can manipulate equations symbolically, differentiating, expanding, simplifying, and substituting much more quickly than I can.
And, of course, it is a great RPN calculator with an unlimited stack and the ability to store and manipulate any kind of object on that stack: Anything you can do through a graphical frontend you can also do with stack functions you can include in a program. You can even build functions inside functions, and there are higher-order functions that can apply them in useful ways.
It is a solid, well-made brick with a clear and readable screen that lasts for years on a single set of batteries and it rarely goes too far from my hands. I’m an HP geek and proud of it!
The HP 28S was without peer. It had a more Forthlike version of RPN complete with swap and dup, and didn’t do that wifty thing other HP’s did with stack lift. And after using its unit conversion utility, I find no others satisfactory. Mine is now old and ailing, unfortunately.
I want to win a brazilian dollars and manufacture 28S-like calculators with titanium bodies and sapphire display windows. I want these things to be ARCHIVAL.
I had an HP 15C calculator in college that I loved, but I lost it a few years out of school. It’s been discontinued, so I can’t replace it easily, but I’m not doing engineering anymore, so I really don’t need it.
I don’t calculate enough to have a favorite—if I need to do more than what a basic $10 scientific calculator can handle, I turn to my computer. But at the risk of semi-hijacking the thread, I’d like to express a couple of calculator-related opinions.
TI calculators are overrated. It seems that’s what all the kids have nowadays, but why? They’re not bad calculators, but they’re neither the cheapest nor the easiest to use nor the most reliable/durable nor the most feature-packed.
Windows’s built-in calculator is Lame (notice the capital L). It hasn’t been updated since the early days of Windows, and its scientific calculator mode lacks plenty of features that are standard on pretty much any scientific calculator you can buy nowadays (e.g. the ability to work with fractions; combinatorial functions; multiple memories). Heck, I don’t see why it can’t have a graphing calculator mode.
Thudlow Boink:
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[li]TIs are what the schools like. Teachers know TIs from familiarity with them, math classrooms have loaner TIs for the students without calculators to use, and some textbooks have TI-specific examples in them. I don’t know why this is the case, but I can imagine a few reasons.[/li][li]There are plenty of good calculators for Windows. I loved Excalibur back when Windows 95 was my OS: It is a very full-featured RPN calculator with tons of functions and a great display. There is a simple grapher available as a Windows XP PowerToy from Microsoft, but I don’t like it very well quite honestly. (My laptop dual-boots between Linux and Windows XP. I spend most of my time in Linux.)[/li][/ul]
In the mid 80s I bought a little calculator at K-Mart that was the precise dimensions of a credit card, for about 5 bucks. It had the rounded corners and everything – I could slip it into the middle of a stack of credit cards and you wouldn’t be able to see which one was the calculator.
Eventually it broke and I never found one like it :(. If I ever do, I’ll buy it.
I love my TI-30X IIS! It is a great, inexpensive, but full featured calculator. I have had it for many years and it is my “go to” calculator for most of my needs. I also have a TI-89 Titanium, which is an awesomely powerful machine (albeit one with a very steep learning curve). I freely admit that I can only do a mere fraction of what the TI-89 is capable of; however on my TI-30X my fingers are a virtual blur as they fly across the keys.
On a related note, anyone interested in buying a slightly used Titanium?
I used to have a Casio that added and subtracted in hours, minutes and seconds. It was one of their least expensive models - $8. It was so handy for radio, only I wasn’t working in radio at the time. It went missing out of my suitcase on a flight to Florida in 1997. Casio stopped making it, and I can’t find another one for love nor money. I even contacted Casio. No luck. The model number was something like HLU-8. Anybody got a spare one?
Chalk me up as another HPer. I started with an HP-41…then went to a 28s, then lastly a 48sx (like the GX, but without any expansion.) I dearly loved that caluclator all through college. I was slightly bummed when, during the last week of class in my last semester in Civil engineering, a homework problem with a HUGE matrix I could enter into the calculator to solve a problem…(ugh, I just re-read that attempt at a sentence.)
It couldn’t do it…it ran out of memory.
Course once i left college, it spent a few weeks balancing my checkbook, then got put in a drawer once I move to Quicken.
I’m a little saddened that HP’s last great calulator project got canned. Picture a full dedicated HP48 type calculator, but with a full color screens, TONS of ram and FAST FAST FAST processors:
I’ve had 3 calculators in my life but I loved eeeeevery one
Let’s see… the first was a red dollar store model the size of a credit card. It was not the clunky solar-powered calculator our school wanted us to get and won me great respect from my peers for… having an off button (I guess third graders are easily impressed).
Then there was my dad’s scientific calculator (a Canon F-800 if you’re interested; I have it sitting right here). It’s fairly notable because it was made in the late 80s and can calculate in 4 bases and handles complex numbers. I used it in my first two years of high school and then exchanged it for a graphics. I accidentally spilled water on it a few days ago but was very careful to dry it before turning it on and it seems to be doing okay.
The one I’m using now (or at least, was using until I graduated 2 days ago) is a Casio CFX-9850 PLUS (yes, PLUS!). I think it’s a pretty standard calculator. I spent many happy hours playing games on it instead of working in class. Oh yes. It also has a very limited memory and no RAM so if you put too many programs on it you’ll pay come test time. Good times.
I don’t really use it any more, but I still have my trusty 28S. Started off with the good old 16C, but it disappeared at some point and I got the 28S. Ah, the stories I could tell…
On another note, a buddy of mine was once using his 16C during chem lab when his partner accidentally spilled a strong HCl solution on it. He grabbed the calculator, washed it off under the tap, took it home and used his sister’s hair dryer to dry it out…and the thing still worked fine.
Uh, memory is RAM. Can you be a bit more explicit about what you mean?
Well, I use my calculator in bed sometimes. (I find software development relaxing.) But on a functional level, does Excel do symbolic math? I’d be very surprised if it did. (I’ve never used Excel, myself.)
(I could replace ‘Excel’ with ‘GNU Octave’ or ‘Maxima’ to make it relevant to my life, but I’m honestly curious now.)
I am just as fast on my HP: The key positions are practically all muscle memory.
My HP-48GX doesn’t, no. I don’t know about Casios or TIs, but I suspect they don’t either. (In fact, on my HP the stack contents survive a power cycle, indicating that nonvolatile storage and working store are one in the same.)
So I guess I understand you better now, mainly because I understand your misunderstanding. Make sense?
No; it’s basically just a data-crunching program. As an electrical engineer, I use it extensively. I guess I have never had a need for a software package (e.g. Mathematica) that performs symbolic math.
I had a Casio FX-4000P in college - I liked it a lot. Dot matrix display, programmable (I wrote “craps” for it), did everything I needed (anything more complicated I used a computer – many of my tests were open VAX)
