If you have a workstation with 256GB of RAM...
...Then you have more memory than the combined total of all the models listed in this article ever shipped.
Don't feel old, just drink a beer. You have earned it!
The Internet Archive has delivered a nostalgic treat in the form of a collection of 14 vintage emulated calculators, now available to play with online. The Archive's "Calculator Drawer" – as it has named the collection – includes classic machines from Texas Instruments' graphing calculator series. You'll find the TI 73 …
I still have the Ti-35 that I got when I started high school around 1980: it lasted all the way thought college and still works
And the HP-48SX I bought in the early 90's is still in perfectly working condition; the zipper on the case is a bit iffy, though (and one of the emulators for Android is the only calculator I use on the phone).
I can vividly picture the school-sanctioned calculator that we were allowed for 'A' level exams in the Midlands back in the late 80's, but I can't for the life of me remember the make or model. The exam boards were understandably strict when it came to preventing cheating in exams using new-fangled "programmable" technology, so this model wasn't programmable or have graphics (neither of which would have been allowed back then).
It was possible to store eight (or ten?) twelve-digit values in variables/registers though, and a creative person <cough!> could hide some quite useful "memory aids" encoded into the 100-ish numeric characters available.
Ooh, hang on, that one looks familiar too, I'd completely forgotten I had one of those before the FX-5500L I mentioned earlier... Thanks for nudging me even further back in time on this little nostalgia trip :-)
I think the reference to "college" entrance exams and "standardized tests" was the giveaway this was a US-centric article...
For this UKian, my weapons of choice were a Casio FX-5500L joined a few years later by a FX-6300G (I *really* wanted a graphing calculator, but couldn't bring myself to pay the asking prices for the full-size ones), both of which remain in full working order, albeit with a much reduced workload these days than they used to be subject to back in the days before you could get a decent calculator app on your phone.
Wikipedia goes there -- but the word links to a pair of Sula nebouxii, i.e. the (literal) birds. Nice.
The first example that came to my mind, though, was the Hollies' album "Five Three One - Double Seven O Four" from 1979. I don't think I've ever heard it, but remember seeing it in the stores, and was at the right age to appreciate the gimmick.
I was surprised when I had to buy a modern calculator for my daughter. There isn't any choice available. Every modern calculator that I could find, regardless of the brand stamped on it, seems to use exactly the same chip, and often the same circuit board.There is nothing to choose between them.
TBH, they are probably produced by the pallet load in some factory in Shenzhen, China. That seems to be the case with pretty much all electronics these days. No variety. I miss the days when you could pick up some device, and think "What the hell were they thinking?" as you try and work out how to hold and use the device without getting RSI..
The Casio FX 602p was the upgrade to the FX-501p I first bought, and they were effectively my first foray into programming (there was no way I could afford the far more fancy HP 41C).
It could record and play back "programs" on cassette tape, if you can call a max 512 steps a program, and teachers deciding I should pay more attention to class and switching it off never worked out that it had permanent memory so you could just switch it back on and continue where you were so rudely interrupted :).
I'd call it prep for buying the first Psion Organiser II XP that launched later, which got me intoprogramming,machine code and later assembly. None of that with any formal education, but having a portable device means you can just grab it whenever something enters your mind, and frankly I miss that sort of simple "Hello world" coding ability from modern devices.
Oh well, it was fun. And I still have an Organiser II LZ 64 somewhere..
Never could afford or justify the $$$ for one of the HP-48's, but did get an HP-20S for a reasonable price and used it to get through a year and a half of Calculus and a year of Physics. None of that fancy graphical stuff or high-end RPN gee-whizzery, but it did have just enough crude macro capability to be useful. I still use it every now and then. I eventually picked up a TI-81 and spent a week ooh-ing and ahh-ing that it could draw functions. The TI didn't survive a fall a few years later.
I also remember about 7 or 8 years ago being gob-smacked that I could get a pretty decently functional (but non-graphing) scientific calculator at a dollar-only store for a buck. Whoda thunk it...
I had/have an Otis King cylindrical slide rule. I do feel old…
The TI 59 was useful for its time. I wrote a few engineering programs for some exams, carefully saved to those little magnetic strips. I had to learn RPN for borrowing the more popular HP-whatever, and when the TI died I also switched to HP. Eventually I gave the HP away but don't recall to whom. However, I do still have the K&E slide rule which my dad used when he went to college.
I got a first-gen TI-81 during my GCSE years. No backup battery for the program memory, so when your batteries died, you lost all your programs, and you'd have to type them in again from scratch! Still, good little machine otherwise, I might go an check out the emulator for a bit of nostalgia.
There are many Android apps that emulate various HP, TI and Casio calculators, and presumably other brands that I didn't think to look for. Perhaps that's the case for iThings as well.
My daily driver is RpnCalc, which doesn't claim to emulate any particular HP device, but does have the classic HP look and feel.
Can't remember the model no. but it had leds and did hex and octal along with boolean algebra. I was working for Crédit Agricole in Saintes and you would be excused for thinking I'd invented low temperature fusion, so popular did it make me. Very handy for VME dump cracking, or duck cramping as we amusingly called it.
I'm sure I have a memory of some old Casio scientific calculators that would produce an odd (not even) result when asked to calculate 2^32 or 2^33, which were the largest numbers in the sequence before it would go into scientific notation. Sadly my Casio fx100 was lost years ago so I can't try this again. Does anyone else remember this?
First basic calculator that totally mesmerised me was a Casio Personal 1. Really no big deal unless it was the first one you've seen.
Who can remember putting in a number and then repeatedly pressing Square Root radical button until the display reduced to 0.000001 ?
Then I became a calculator addict. At school I used an FX-81. Then for college the FX-450/451 folding wallet machine that could work in DEC-BIN-OCT-HEX.
My latest ones are programmable in Python, including my TI NSpire II CAS which is incredible.