Most common calculators in the forum?

[wyatt8740]

(11-17-2018 02:58 AM)Jlouis Wrote:  I agree with you, the 28c/s have a very elegant and usefull form factor. I really enjoy them. When I use them in a public place, many people look at them and some start a conversation about them.

I've not had that happen with my 28 quite yet - I've had some conversations that came around to it eventually, but never had someone stop to ask me about it. Probably a matter of time, but people are pretty reserved and introverted in Indiana, it feels like.
I have had two or three ask me when I use my ThinkPad with a dock, though (it's pretty fat and well-equipped port-wise for a somewhat modern laptop), so I know those people must be out there.

(11-17-2018 02:58 AM)Jlouis Wrote:  As for the TI 89 titaneum, you are correct in not counting it in your collection. I have one that is very useful as a paper weight or a door stop.

Haha, I actually like mine for a few things. Symbolic math is much more fleshed-out and natural on it than a 28/48/49/50 or most Lisps, for instance. And it is better at integration than an RPL calc. But it's hurt by the incredibly vulnerable screen, which got a dark patch on it from rubbing against a pencil eraser in my backpack, and by not using RPN for everything else, and by using a weird sort-of-BASIC-but-not-really for a programming language, which makes little sense and which is hard if not impossible to return values from to the home screen for further computation. Add that to its high price and it's CPU being slower and less well equipped than the one in my Mac Plus or Amiga 500, and it's pretty sad. I got both of those (the Amiga with a HDD and a huge box of floppies) combined for less than an 89 tends to cost online. But I got pretty lucky; found mine for $35 at a bookstore that apparently didn't know better.

The catalog on the 28 makes programming pretty easy; even if I don't have the manual on hand to reference, I can often figure out what function I should be using and how I should call it. It's the single biggest drawback I've yet found on the 48SX— there doesn't appear to be a catalog at all. The next biggest drawback of the 48 (albeit one mostly solvable with custom menus) is the lack of a "ROLL" button. Then there's the terrible screen of the 48S, the somewhat better screen of the 48G (which still looks worse than the 28 from a normal angle), and the terrible button layout and feel of the 49G and the difficulty of swapping screens from a 49G into a 48 and keeping it looking decent.

On the other hand, there isn't an emulator for the HP-28 made for Unix, but there's X48 for the 48's. Emu42 mostly works in wine, but after a while the emulated calculator appears to freeze and won't resume working until I close and re-open the program. Also, there's the ever-present I/O problem on the 28 and its extreme difficulty to repair.

(11-17-2018 12:09 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  And, I hardly dare say that on this forum, if I had to go back to university now I personally would take a Ti89 or Voyage200 rather than any calculator made by HP after 1980.

As a current university student, there are lots of classes which won't let me use an 89 (or sometimes even an 84) that have no problem with me using my HP-28S on tests. I'm not sure if it's just the relative obscurity nowadays, or the screen's aspect ratio, or both, but people tend to assume it's not very capable despite it being able to symbolically differentiate equations.
Until I told my calc teacher that my calculator could technically draw graphs (at about the same speed as a tortoise climbing up a downward escalator), she was going to let me use it on my final, even. I probably could have gotten away with it scot-free, if I'd wanted to ("Look, it says "scientific calculator" right there on the top... You said we were only allowed to use a scientific calculator for our final..." – Graphing not really being the main selling point of a 28 back when graphing calculators were in their infancy anyway and HP calculators were aimed at scientists and engineers).

Also, I'm pretty sure a lot of academia has somehow gotten the idea that calculators that do symbolic math are necessarily "graphing calculators" with massive, tall screens. I probably have the ubiquity of the TI-83/84 lines to thank for that. Those are such a joke that even the new ones with color screens and 48mhz eZ80s and eight times more RAM can't do symbolic math at even close to the level of a 27-28 year old HP model that costs far less used.

Plus, the 28 is what got me to fall down the Lisp rabbit hole, so I have it to thank for that, too. All the TI ever did was make me hate BASIC (which the VIC-20, my first programming experience, had already done).