Your First Handheld?

[brickviking]

If you were to ask about HP, I'd have to say an oldschool HP-34C. As for calculator, I'd have to say the Sharp PC-1247 was the first I can actually remember owning, more of a nanocomputer than a calculator. 3,328 bytes of RAM, POKE/PEEK and BASIC. Funnily enough, I could poke/peek directly into the program space, allowing me to do really weird things with my program. It even had the ability to store programs to cassette tape, I found out the pinouts and cobbled together an output to my microcassette.

The HP-34C was also the first time I stumbled across the fact that HP calculators could calculate factorials for non-integers, effectively gamma(x-1). I only wish it had held on for longer, I eventually had to toss it. My blog entry describes my experiences with it and other calculators I still own today.

Now of course, I have a HP-50G, and contrary to this post in the archives, I consider it the best calculator I own. Sure, it might not be very pocketable, but it'll handle most things I throw at it, I just lack the expertise to utilise it to its fullest extent. My Casio fx9750GII might be easier to program, but it doesn't do as much as the HP-50G.

I miss the click of those HP-34C keys though...

(05-07-2014 08:04 PM)walter b Wrote:  My story is printed on p. 242 in the WP 34S Owner's Manual so there's no need to repeat it here.

Say what? Version 3.1 of the manual only has 211 pages... and version 3.0 only has 118 pages. I can't find a "page 242".

(Post 1)

Regards, BrickViking