Got quite a collection myself Chris. Everytime the curriculum changes so do the calculators so I have to get a new one each time as well as the inevitable evolutions along the way. Not a big fan of HP calculators although I have owned and do own a few. I used to have one with RPN which was a bit of a pain but was fully programmable if you knew HP speak. My all time favourite would be the sharp EL-548G. Even though it only had a single line display I somehow became one with that calculator and always knew where I was (memorised the menu's). Geek, hell yes .
I have got a HP 33E and HP33 C if you want them? There are also some manuals and mathpac's somewhere. Found them! I have spent so much time using them before decent computers I have no love for them at all. I just could not throw them out though.
I have got a HP 33E and HP33 C if you want them? There are also some manuals and mathpac's somewhere. Found them! I have spent so much time using them before decent computers I have no love for them at all. I just could not throw them out though.
Chris has probably had a heart attack !!! Chris are you there??
Quote:
Originally Posted by avandonk
I have got a HP 33E and HP33 C if you want them? There are also some manuals and mathpac's somewhere. Found them! I have spent so much time using them before decent computers I have no love for them at all. I just could not throw them out though.
They were a good calc David. If I remember, Casio were trying to keep it smart enough to have plenty of scientific functionality without it being programmable as such. I suppose that it was another, like the HP32E, that hoped to make into lots of late high school school bags and exams because it could not pre-store formulae.
Chris the batteries are most probably way past their use by date. I have only one AC adapter. Both calculators were working when the batteries were OK.
My first calculator was a HP35 in 1971?. I wore it out! At that time they were $135 when my salary was about $50 a week. At Kodak we had the mechanical Marchant caculators. They divided by subtracting. If you did not move the decimal point it would crank all day to get an answer. Tell that to the young people today and they won't believe you.
Yes, there were some quirky workarounds that didn't take them long to figure out. I'd LOVE an HP35. As I said to Eric, they are around but a really good one is now a very rare and exxy item.
I just realized the Mathpac is for the HP 35. My memory is not as clear as I thought. A colleague at CSIRO Ekeichi Suzuki gave it to me so long ago. He died of cancer over twenty five years ago. Seeing both of these calculators again has stirred up memories I thought I had lost. I am glad they are going to a good home where they will be loved not abandoned in a drawer in the dark.
I still have my original Microbee computer packed away in the shed. It started life as a 32k tape drive system, but after I finished uni I upgraded it to "chook-in-a-book" status. Sometime after that IBM came out with the PC...
Hold on to that, it's an important part of Australia's history.
Quote:
Originally Posted by avandonk
At Kodak we had the mechanical Marchant caculators. They divided by subtracting.
I don't really understand the appeal of calculators, but hey, each to their own!
Matt, vintage calculators are snapshots in time, which in itself is very interesting. When they first came out they were technological marvels of the age. Each subsequent model that came out reflected the amount of development that had occurred since the previous one. It was brilliant seeing it all happen back in the 70's and 80's. Much like watching the desktop computer bloom over that time too. It's all to be taken for granted these days.
In the early 70's a family friend flew over from the US and showed me this wondrous thing ( I think was a Texas Instruments DataMath).I stayed up all night playing with it. It had rechargeable battery's. Wow that was long ago.
I still have my original Microbee computer packed away in the shed. It started life as a 32k tape drive system, but after I finished uni I upgraded it to "chook-in-a-book" status. Sometime after that IBM came out with the PC...
Yep Al - I have a Microbee and its predecessor - the Z-80 based S-100 bus system from Applied Technology in Lindfield. This bus structure was used most famously by both Altair and Imsai as the underpinning of the first real home computers running CP/M and MP/M. I built mine up from component level - piece by piece around 1981. Great fun!
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I don't really understand the appeal of calculators, but hey, each to their own!
