HP 42s -- "TOP.FCN" Message #1 Posted by Anthony (USA) on 8 Mar 2011, 3:05 a.m.
Hi, everyone, I'm doing a school research about several calculators (I chose the HP Pioneer series calculators), and I came across an interesting aspect concerning HP 42s. I don't own one myself, and since I don't have access to a manual, I am not really sure; but my question is what is the purpose of the "TOP.FCN" menu accessed above the zero key? I found out that by activating that menu, one would simply get a menu with items corresponding to the functions on the top row of the calculator: sigma plus, reciprocal, square root, logarithm, natural logarithm, and execute. Isn't it kind of weird? One could just press the physical square root key, for instance, to find the square root of a number; it would be a waste of two keystrokes to access the TOP.FCN menu just to accomplish what could easily be done with one key press. Please help me out, I'm not too knowledgeable (yet) and it's just killing me not knowing the exact purpose of the TOP.FCN menu of the HP 42s, because right now to me, it seems redundant and a waste of menu/function/space. Thank you. :)
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