I had a first gen ti-82 that we were required to have by the math department.. I was in computer engineering.. So, like most of my actual classmates I saw the math credits as a thing to be endured. It didn't take long to get decent at programming the 82. So, I programmed it to handle a pile of common problems. This was like hitting the turbo button on my finals. I was done way ahead of everyone, and walked it up front to get the grade on the spot. The TA graded me, then followed me out into the hall to ask some questions. First he was mystified by how fast I got through the exam and was annoyed by how little work I was showing.. So, I explained that I had my calculator programmed to handle the annoying stuff. He then suggested that it was not fair that I had programs doing the work... At which point I informed him that forcing a CE guy to buy a programmable calculator and then not expect it to be programmed was in fact crazy talk.

My HP 45 or something recently gave out. I learned to love RPN in engineering school (by grad school numbers were irrelevant). I have bought a couple of HP calculators since then assuming they were RPN and been disappointed.

But "she who must not be named" K, wants me to tell the story of how a crow tried to steal my HP45?? calculator one summer on the way home from taking circuit theory I. I was walking down the beautiful tree lined streets of Manhattan KS (Home of the K-state Wildcats) deep in thought about Kirchhoff's Laws when a crow jumps in front of me maybe 15 feet and caws at me. I think it is just a stupid bird so I keep walking, but the crow becomes belligerent, not will to give its ground and flies at me. I turn my head and duck and my (relatively new) HP calculator falls on the cement sidewalk as I back away. I am stunned as the crow lands on the sidewalk and picks up the calculator by a loop in the case and tries to fly away. I can't afford to lose my calculator so I run at the bird waving my hands and shouting. The crow got the calculator 3-4 feet off the ground before I startled it. I picked up the calculator happy to find it still worked and determined to defend it from all birds, bitches, or other vermin.

True story:

In 11th grade, many year ago, I had an instructor who conducted a class experiment. Half of the class was given calculators to work with and the rest was left to do the algebra on paper by hand ( I was without). Every single person without a calculator finished the 25 problems well before those who used calculators.

Not quite the caliber story as they rest of you but it was an opportunity to share a memory that stuck with me all these years.

I don't have a great story, but I had a TI something or other that cost a fortune and had chips you changed for whatever you wanted. All of us geology majors used one in the detested statistics class. I lost track of that somewhere along the line, but I'm sure it's living happily ever after with my brunton compass.

This is dumb but when I was in college I wanted a really good calculator. I didn't have a lot of money so I saved up and bought the best available calculator. I didn't realize that it had a print function. Every time I turned it on it made a noise. Every test I had in college math I was known as the buzz guy. It would be quiet as could be and you would hear my calculator turn on. To save energy it turned itself off so when I needed it the whole class would hear bzzzzzzzzz. Dumb but I still remember it.

In 70s, HP and TI reps used to go at it face to face at department stores. The HP rep would do some calc on an HP-35 of HP-45; the TI rep would repeat it on the TI-58 ot TI-59. The HP rep would do another calc; the TI rep would repeat it. Finally, the HP rep would do some calc and deliberately drop the calculator on the floor. Game over. I still have HP-15c on my desk.

My dad always used to tell me that my graphing calculator I used for calculus had more memory and processing power in it than the computers we used to send men to the moon. Not that I made excuses before for not being able to do things, but I definitely would never make an excuse after that.

All I remember in the 70's is having to spend about $89 to buy a Corvus 411 calculator that ran for a few days on four AA Cells or you could just plug it in. It had 8 digits precision and algebraic logic, 8 functions, 24 keys and an LED display. What's astounding is, I just opened the junk drawer in my desk and I still have it. The power supply wire is epoxied into the calculator. I just mentioned that so I could tell you I'm really interested in the rest of your story about the 10K.

Anyone know where I can get a couple of new metal curser frames for my K&E 4081-3 Log Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule for a reasonable price? They seem to have dissolved, or oxidized away.

RPN rules!

Aren't there any old guys out there? (What girl would admit to being old)?

The pinnacle of calculator-dom is the HP-41C (Continuous memory, programmable). Accessries include a magnetic card reader and pre-programmed plug-in modules). HP-41s are INDESTRUCTIBLE, almost. The display on mine is turning black at the ends but it should last a few more decades.

RPN (Reverse Polish Notation!).
Enter a number and it automatically clears the registers. Enter another number, THEN select what you want to do with it (Add, subtract, multiply, divide, square, raise to a power and so on). Parentheses aren't needed, just keep on truckin'. The interim result is always shown until finally, you're all done.

Scads of storage registers can save anything you like, such as a list of cars and the MPG each delivers.

My HP-41 is not for sale. Where can I get a good deal on a spare?

Not my story -- When Laurel and I were talking civil engineering classes at New Mexico State (1978-1979), the ASCE student trophy case had Bob Brittan's sliderule. He finished four years with a perfect four-point. The slip stick was worn and beaten. In fact, I think that the first part of the CD was torn off at the far left. We were looking at it in wonder and someone else asked how you could use it. One professor pointed out that you just work the problem a different way, but another professor said that you don't need a calculator to get through his courses. The light went on! I never had his classes, but I saw some tests: You do the algebra or trig or maybe calculus, and the numerical answer is easy. (See Ashinoff here on the 25 kids who used algebra without a calculator.)

BTW, I have sliderules. In fact, some years back, Keuffel and Esser advertised in an engineering magazine (Industrial Research maybe) that they had a crate in a warehouse. Send them an SASE or something and get a free slide rule. Since then, I picked up a couple at second-hand stores. I have a nice one in a leather case for your belt. I wear it at science fiction conventions and such. "It is the formal computing device of a Jedi physicist, an elegant tool from a simpler time, from before the dark times and the empire."

About 1982 or so, in response to the creation of a computer science department at our community college, my physics instructor said, "We had sliderules, but no one majored in them."

I have mentioned before that although my freshman year was 1967, I went back and completed my degrees 2005-2010. I had credit for a semester of calculus, but not algebra. I took the class without a book and without a calculator and got an A. On one test, I had to settle for partial credit for one problem. We had a linear regression with ten points and I only finished three by hand.

My saving grace was Cleveland Public Schools. I had ten semesters of math in four years (counting summer school). I was actually in Calculus One when I got kicked out as a discipline problem and went to another school. I could not get into their calculus class, so I took another semester of "senior math", with probability and stuff.

My wife and I both can outrace the cashier. Again in CPS, in junior high, for three semesters, we had six weeks of "mental math" learning to estimate, borrow, carry, etc., in our heads. I picked up a few more tricks from Feynman's stories. Also, oddly enough, it was computer programming that put the icing on the cake. It was an easy lesson that you can guess almost anything by taking half the correction three times.

While in undergraduate Mech Eng, my small class drew a terrible Polish professor for Machine Design who was killing us by just reading the book in class. We all loved another fantastic professor who would start a class talking hot rods, and 30 min later you realized that had become the lecture. One evening at ~2am, we couldn't take it anymore, so we made an effigy from a T-square and old TI-calculator rewired to flash in a demonic manner with its circuit boards all broken in a technical disembowelment. We broke in to the professors office row, and left it with a note appealing to him to use his god-like powers to save us.
For what it is worth, that Polish guy was later let go, thank goodness.

My date of birth is 7-7-34.
I've used it hundreds of times but only recently, someone pointed out that when those numbers are put into a calculator and the calculator is turned upside down, it spells hell. I'm not sure of the significance if there is any.

Who other than I remember calculators with Nixie tubes?

I got my first calculator for the winter holidays when I was 6 years old. It was a Sharp, with an LCD display, not an LED display that required more power than you could get from for long from a pair of AAs. The keys were rubbery. The keypad was shrouded in real metal. I still stands out in my mind.

Now I use an HP33s. When they cancelled the HP32s and replaced with with the HP33s, the price of used HP32s shot up. I think I sold it for more than I paid for it and got the new HP33s.

I have an HP48gx that I never cared for. That tiny bit of latency when you do an operation drives me crazy.

I still have my 1981 HP 15C and 6 HP 32SIIs and I use them every day. I keep RPN calculators all over my house, lab and office so I don't have to carry one around, misplace it, or worse yet, drop it. RPN is so logical compared arithmetic entry and Excel is like math designed by Obama. I don't trust any complex formula in Excel, especially trig, until I have verified it on an HP calculator. Trig in three dimensions? I do it on HP unless the calcs are voluminous and it's worth the time & screaming at Bill Gates to set up Excel to do it. Long live RPN!

my first calculator was a Bowmar MX100 Scientific
Brain;; it cost $135 and I had to drive to Memphis
to buy it. I used it for years, and even carried it
for a spare to my PE test. 3 slide rules, 3 calculators,
and spare batteries. a suitcase full of books. pens
and pencils and scaled rulers and everything but
a pocket protector.

the Bowmar was forwarded to a high school kid
and lasted 10 years.

today I use an hp 41cx which I bought for my first
wife when she tried computer science in '82.
tough machine. it winked out once (N batteries)
when I was negotiating the purchase of 20 acres
of land, and the "opposition" brought out a light-
powered thing which came in a cracker jack box
to finish up. embarrassed??? -- j

http://www.computerhistory.org/collectio...
http://www.amazon.com/HP-41CX/dp/B004BNR...

Before smartphones, we used our graphing calculators to learn basic programming. We learned how to program games that we could play to pass the time at school. The games ranged from simple pong or pac man, to a game called drug war, that we had lots of fun customizing to create hilarious situations...

I am one of those who think that one of the duties of being a father is to teach his kids early to memorize the multiplication table (up to 12 x 12). Both our sons did it quickly and well. Our older son, at age 9, asked me to buy him a calculator. I managed to avoid doing that, fearing that using the calculator would diminish his mental calculation abilities. At about the same time he started distributing the local newspaper to the homes in the neighborhood. As soon as he earned enough, he bought himself a TI calculator. Without a doubt, it greatly increased his interest in mathematics, numbers and calculations, mental or not. Today, he is the VP for strategic planning and initiatives of a huge corporation. I learned.

My first calculator was a Bowmar Brain 4 function. My freshman year in college was the last year that engineering school had a slide rule use class. A couple years later my older brother gave me his nice HP. 20 years later solar powered multi function calculators were free gifts for signing up for just about anything. I think we are on the same trajectory with Android tablets.

I still use my HP15C from my plebe year 30 years ago. At one point, I lost the cover for the battery compartment. I called an HP support number to see where I could buy one. I told him how long I'd had the calculator and the guy asked for my address and sent me one in a small envelope.

For decades I thought RPN was just an ethnic joke. Then, I found my old manual for the calculator in an old box of books and, looking through it, found out that it was indeed the name. LOL.

I don't have my own story, but my contractor told me this. He figured the price of jobs out in his head, so he gets a calculator...what kind..no idea. Anyway, figures this job out and he must have hit a wrong button because the bid was $2500.00 different than the material on the job....so he smashed it with his hammer and still to this day, uses his brain.

I'm an HP guy. I own several for my work.

My favorite story was actually told to me by my roommate at Cal Poly when we were in school there. It was during finals week when my buddy was walking through the 1st floor of the Achitecture building when, suddenly, a door from a classroom flew open near the end of a test (obviously) and a student dashed out. He made a beeline straight for a big trash can where he held out his calculator over the can and, gripping it at each end with his hands, he twisted it into a thousand pieces - explosively. I think he even yelled out, "Yeaahhh!!!" in anger while doing it.

I'll never forget that story.

I have my old 15c from college, one of the original 48 from my early engineering days, a couple 33s (for the P.E. exam) and now a 12c for my financial calcs. Great calculators. The old ones never die.

When I graduated and went to grad school, my fiance got me an HP28. I turned my nose up to RPN until then. After using it for a month, became a convert, and never looked back.
BTW, this calculator will do symbolic differentiation and integration as well as matrix math. In graduate digital controls class I flew though problems by pushing "x^-1", rather than doing the long-hand adjoint/determinant. Great calculator for 1987!
About 3yrs ago, I stopped carrying my HP48G (which was a waste on a management-puke like me anyway), and just use a nice RPN app on my iPhone and iPad!

Great example of the value of thinking and abstract math!
Went against the wrong post...