I don't even try to guess.

:-) The scene of the guy using the slide rule (see another post down below us somewhere...)

That was cute, thanks!!! "I can add!"

My hometown

I have a circular one, ancient at that, that calculates volumes of different paving materials & component percentages, does weight conversions, temps, cooling rate ratios to ambient temps and RH's, volumetric compaction calculations... limited application, but if you were engineering a highway, what a cool beast! I think it came out of the 40's or 50's, amazing piece of work for its day. I found it in an abandoned wooden desk (under the drawer) early in my 7 to 630 job, and hope to pass it on to someone who will appreciate (and use) it when I finally go to work for myself full-time!

My old K+E that I still have (and use) is wooden core plastic. Lost the cursor (didn't have the cool metal ends to keep that from happening) and searched for months in 2nd hand stores, antique shops, and junk shops until I found one that fit. Came with a green belt case (woohoo) - I used to get purses with an outside pocket to keep it in, at the ready, "just in case"... --giggles--

Know what I remember from high school? Algebra teacher telling us "Sure, calculators are nifty (does anyone still use "nifty"??!!) but your slide role won't run out of batteries at the worst possible time". Never forgot it.

Of course, I envied the magnifying cursor on my friends, oh, what was that ugly yellow thing... Way fun (and easy) to use, but gads, how I hated that yellow color! Ick!!! I think it was a Pickett... Bleah.

I **loved** the red LED displays... nothing cooler. Until the display inexplicitly died - and they always did, usually right in the middle of running calculations or somesuch.

Know what I remember better, tho? The watches (IIRC mine were usually Timexes) that had the same red LEDs in it - moonlighted during High School, and working at night they always just *worked*. They ate batteries like no ones business, tho - I got *very* adept at popping the back cover and sliding a new mercury cell in its place.

When the last one finally died I went through holy heck to find another. Never could... tho recently I saw one in an antique store. Felt really old then.

I had a frequency counter that used Nixie Tubes (ancient but accurate)... one burned out (they do that eventually) and I had a dickens of a time finding a replacement - ended up having to rewire the base socket to the tube.

Oh... er... that was a MUCH OLDER friend who that happened to... I couldn't be that old... no way, no how...

Or worse, the teacher (who was likely trained from a TI book) would go over to a kid who had an HP and try to show the student how to do the problem, and then look bad when they couldn't use it.

Of course, that would be expecting the teacher to be somewhat expert in knowing the subject - or have enough common sense to figure it out.

He 's a ladykiller. His favorite icebeaker is to flip girls. He was a wrestler :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD0NfshRy...

At least I *hope* you were referring to... um... canines.

Point for RPN - my desk calculator runs RPN, and its fun watching someone who doesn't know try to use it.

Then again, it's a sign of the times when you're the only person in your office who has a desk calculator...

It reminds me of the nonsense they were headed toward as I was getting out of school - it's irrelevant if they get the correct answer or not, as long as they *try*.

I always wondered what the Apollo 11 (or 13) astronauts would have done had that been the norm then. Well, we got the engineering wrong, you'll miss the moon (or earth) by a few thousand miles, and run out of air 2 days before your projected landing rather than have a 72 hour reserve, but you should be proud to know that, while our answers were wrong, we tried. Really really hard.

I do.

Linear or circular? Yes to both.

In 70s, HP and TI reps used to go at it face to face at department stores. The HP rep would do some calc on an HP-35 of HP-45; the TI rep would repeat it on the TI-58 ot TI-59. The HP rep would do another calc; the TI rep would repeat it. Finally, the HP rep would do some calc and deliberately drop the calculator on the floor. Game over. I still have HP-15c on my desk.

My dad always used to tell me that my graphing calculator I used for calculus had more memory and processing power in it than the computers we used to send men to the moon. Not that I made excuses before for not being able to do things, but I definitely would never make an excuse after that.

When I was 4th grade it was a pre-boob time. Then, a boob was a ninny, or a person prone to making silly mistakes. A Jerry Lewis type. By 8th grade, we were reading excerpts from Shakespeare, and the word "brazier" a metal container holding burning coals, got us all giggly. I guess the degree of sophistication has changed in the last umpteen years since I was a lad.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-...

Hello khalling,
I once had a favorite scientific calculator. In fact, I just checked my desk drawer and still have it. It is a Sharp model EL-509A. It hasn't worked in years, but for some reason I haven't thrown it away. Before I had CNC machines and CAD-CAM computer systems it was an amazing time saver for me since I did so much trigonometry. Well I remember the beginning of the end for it. I had it sitting on top of a lathe I was running and it got knocked off the headstock and landed on the spinning chuck. It danced repeatedly into the sky with every rotating chuck jaw for what seemed like an eternity, but I'm sure was only a few seconds. It was beat up, still worked, but was never the same. It had rubber buttons and a reliable touch. They no longer made it and the replacement has had plastic buttons and just didn't have the same feel. It is true that "they just don't make 'em like they used to."
Regards,
O.A.

we had to say "boobs" in 4th grade to get a laugh...that's how old I am...

RPN rules!

Aren't there any old guys out there? (What girl would admit to being old)?

The pinnacle of calculator-dom is the HP-41C (Continuous memory, programmable). Accessries include a magnetic card reader and pre-programmed plug-in modules). HP-41s are INDESTRUCTIBLE, almost. The display on mine is turning black at the ends but it should last a few more decades.

RPN (Reverse Polish Notation!).
Enter a number and it automatically clears the registers. Enter another number, THEN select what you want to do with it (Add, subtract, multiply, divide, square, raise to a power and so on). Parentheses aren't needed, just keep on truckin'. The interim result is always shown until finally, you're all done.

Scads of storage registers can save anything you like, such as a list of cars and the MPG each delivers.

My HP-41 is not for sale. Where can I get a good deal on a spare?