Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffW1
Hi,
The first calculator I ever had was a Texas Instruments SR-50 bought off a bloke who came around to my workplace (Email at Rosebery) in about 1975. He was flogging that one and a Hewlett Packard which had Reverse Polish Notation. I didn't know any forward Polish, much less RPN, so I bought the TI. I remember it cost about $350, which was an enormous amount in those days, but I claimed it on tax. I was hooked. I used to take it to meetings and calculate away, giving everyone else the pip.
Cheers
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My first calculator was bought for 29 pounds in 1963 when I was earning 21 pounds a week (for those who understand not LSD, $58 and $42 respectively). It did square roots with a key press. Its greatest problem was it ran from a peculiar battery that I could never find a replacement for so I could eventually only use it from a PS that I built.
My next calculator was a HP45? bought under student discount for about $250, I think, in 1970. It was great. I loved the RPN and even more the direct polar/cartesian conversion. This was handy as I was doing a measurement on a 36' whip aerial with an RF bridge and a B40 receiver and doing dozens of calcs by hand to plot a Smith Chart. Saved me about a week. I loaned the calculator to my son in 1978 and have not seen it since.
For those who never used RPN it was like entering the steps of a calculation in the reverse order then pressing the "Go" button to get an answer. way to Go!
Barry