Re: OT: Mechanical Calculators - Addiators

From: <Christopher>
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 11:11:00 EST


On Feb 6, 2007, at 12:30 AM, Steve McKenzie wrote:

> In a similar vein, I am down to my last HP32S RPN scientific calulator.
HP went out of the calculator business a few years ago, right about the time my HP67 lost its marbles. I bought two HP48 calculators and have been pleased as punch. You can still find them on the web, apparently new. They're not your old 4 register machines, (in fact they have hundreds of registers) but they use RPN and they're easy to program. The math function library is amazing they have a lot more capability including graphing and built-in math features to do matrix arithmetic and some very elegant algebra and calculus. I do most of my Code work with Excel, but I have no doubt I could do the same stuff at the same level of complexity on the HP48. One really nice feature is the ability to do all kinds of units conversion including dimensional analysis problems very quickly and very accurately.

At the basic level, they operate pretty much like your old HP machinery and you don't need to go into the coplicated stuff if you don't want to, but you're wasting some pretty fine features if you don't. Nicest of all they use ordinary AAA batteries like you get at the drug store and they're easy on them.

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=CerHqijcSl76l54epgSxBh-C_gYLzxigoZNPE3oQ6nPek15tz0lsrWtjLa9gj5MVIwMss-4ITl73">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania
1864)
<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/</a> Received on Tue Feb 06 11:11:00 2007

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