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HP48GX/HP49G

Posted by George Tsiros on 26 May 2002, 10:28 a.m.

I'm a bit young (born 1980) so i guess i lost all of HP's history since the beginning. I was lucky enough to be there when the GX was introduced, which i consider the be the greatest calculating machine yet...and quite possibly ever.

My dad (Chem engineer) knew that the HP calcs were like diamonds. Himself couldn't afford one (told me they cost two months' payments, at least) so he got a ti (loses memory the moment you turn it off).

Anyway, fastforward to 1994, he told me that one of his friends has this strange machine that noone knows how to operate it and that it is very VERY expensive. Oh well, i didn't know much about calculators, so how could i expect what it could do? I sat with it about 2 minutes, trying to make the "main display" go away and show me a command prompt of some kind. Bah.

1997. My dad bought me one. We knew that it was something extremely special, but not anything specific about what it can do...The manual was huge, bigger than the damn calculator itself! But it was nicely laid out so i sat and wrote a 3D scene renderer in RPL. Lines only, and takes about 5 minutes to render each scene, haha! Strangely enough, i took RPL much easier than any other language i "know" (C,pascal,fortran). A couple years later i found out about hpcalc.org, hpmuseum.org, hp history (and present), asm/sysrpl, #hp48 on efnet and now you can find me in #nop3 together with JD.

Right now, i study physics at the university of patras, www.upatras.gr and i use my GX at the laboratories to make a quick draft of the report (ED,a spreadsheet and some little programs are the "suite". Thanks guys...).

Thanks to all the people on the RULES screen... no thanks to Carly...

Bye

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