Calculator Wars at your School
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07-22-2021, 04:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-22-2021 04:10 PM by bbergman.)
Post: #44
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RE: Calculator Wars at your School
Ever since the moment I laid eyes on an HP calculator, I never wanted anything else after that. This would have been around 1979, when a friend took me to a little "tech" store next to the University of Washington's bookstore, where they sold calculators and typewriters and even some early PC's like the Apple II. My eyes lit up like it was Christmas at the sight of the beautiful HP calculators, and I ignored the Apple.
Prior to that, my dad had bought a Commodore calc with the blue LED's, and that was a wonderful machine. The beautiful colored keys, the clean layout, etc. I wish it hadn't been tossed some years later when my mom was cleaning out the garage. I also remember buying one of the small Sinclair programmables from Radio Shack (I think?) around the same timeframe, but it was buggy as heck. Still, I loved the tiny form factor, and the red blinky display while it ran the program. I ended up breaking the case by accident, so I opened it up and after that it did work, but just mainly sat around in a state of disrepair. There wasn't much you could do with it, since the programming steps were few and...strange. My first HP was a 25 (quickly upgraded to 25C about three months later), and all during high school (graduated 1981), I used either a 34C or a 19C. I loved the 19C, but it was pretty big to carry around on your belt pouch. And yes, I did. The 34C won on a day-to-day carry basis. I still have my 19C, but lost my 34C somewhere and replaced it maybe 10-11 years ago for a used one. I convinced my advanced math teachers that if I could write a program to solve a general problem, then that meant I understood the solution well enough to explain my work, so they let me use it as often as I wished. I spent countless hours programming hundreds of solutions in, for problems I only answered once (ever). Ah, the energy of youth! Everyone in high school pretty much had a TI calc (yes, the TI-30), with the exception of the math geeks and those into computers. My HS had one of the first "computer science" classes offered in Seattle, and about half the class owned HP's by the end of the year. We all got started because the first couple of months of the class were devoted to programming a Monroe desk calc. Clackety-clack-clack, but it was amazing at the time. I still vividly remember what it sounds like when that Monroe ran a program to compute some value, or plot some curve vertically up the paper. When we moved up to punch card Fortran programming, a whole group of us went down and bought HP calculators to fawn over the rest of the year. Great memories! |
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