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Not as old as some here, but I was on the tail of slide rule / log tables use in High School. We still had to do mental arithmetic, and learn stuff like cos(30) = sqrt(3)/2.
Nowadays I see fresh engineers having trouble with dBs because they have limited feel for logs. Of course, all of that stuff is irrelevant to what is important today (i.e. facebook).
I bought my first HP calculator in 1983, a 15-C, for my engineering studies. The complex arithmetic and matrix inversion functions were a godsend in electronics engineering. The numerical integration function also saved me a couple of times in physics experiments.
My current workhorse is a 35-S. Having used a HP calculator from the start, I find it incredibly tedious to use a "normal" calculator. The stack works so well, keeping the results of intermediate calculations hanging around for when they are needed later.
-Ivan
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