This story took place when I was in high school. At university, my electronics professor had one of these. He adored that little thing, and all the students were jealous, but they were really expensive so we all used slide rules. At a point, the Sinclair Scientific came out, and my parents bought me one for Christmas. It was a great little machine, very comfortable to use in one hand if you were in the lab. But the switches stopped working after a while. I bought some casio or other machine (no idea what -- it was brown is all O can recall) and that was okay but again the switches got bouncy and then stopped working.
When I got to grad school, I bought an HP (forget the number) and it was trash. I had spent all that money and it was no better than the cheap foreign junk. I was so angry I gathered folks in the lab at a certain point and threw it against a wall to smash it. I wrote to HP, enclosing some of the pieces and telling pretty much this story, and telling the how disappointed I was in their calculator. This was the old days, so somebody actually wrote back with a candid answer that told me that they realized they had a poor design process, but that I should buy one of the new generation. (I was hoping for a discount price, but no go on that!)
So I bought an HP15C. I still have that thing, and it works perfectly. (I've had 2 other HP calculators since, and of course they are better in lots of ways, but I like my old HP12C more.)
I would have none of this attraction but for the RPN feature. The physical aspects of the machine were great and all, but it was really RPN that let me calculate correctly without always thinking I had got lost.
Nowadays I always have a laptop handy and just type in a REPL to do a lot of simple calculations.
PS. before I do any calculation, I do it in my head so I have a very rough idea of the answer. I do that in class quite a lot, and I think my students view this as some kind of magic trick.
When I got to grad school, I bought an HP (forget the number) and it was trash. I had spent all that money and it was no better than the cheap foreign junk. I was so angry I gathered folks in the lab at a certain point and threw it against a wall to smash it. I wrote to HP, enclosing some of the pieces and telling pretty much this story, and telling the how disappointed I was in their calculator. This was the old days, so somebody actually wrote back with a candid answer that told me that they realized they had a poor design process, but that I should buy one of the new generation. (I was hoping for a discount price, but no go on that!)
So I bought an HP15C. I still have that thing, and it works perfectly. (I've had 2 other HP calculators since, and of course they are better in lots of ways, but I like my old HP12C more.)
I would have none of this attraction but for the RPN feature. The physical aspects of the machine were great and all, but it was really RPN that let me calculate correctly without always thinking I had got lost.
Nowadays I always have a laptop handy and just type in a REPL to do a lot of simple calculations.
PS. before I do any calculation, I do it in my head so I have a very rough idea of the answer. I do that in class quite a lot, and I think my students view this as some kind of magic trick.