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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

The HP-15c scientific calculator is a work of pure genius, beauty, and art along with its user manual. My dad has used his daily since ~1986 and demand was high enough to do a re-run in 2012 to make a few thousand more units at over $100 a pop. It uses RPN and can do matrices, calculus, statistics, and run programs. It is small, lightweight, excellent buttons, and the batteries last years. Engineers love them. No graphing, but it is amazing. TI is popular now, but at one point, only HP could be used for real math.

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As much as I loved my HP-15 an HP-41, I think you have a rosy recollection of that time.

Back then, HP calculators were seen as expensive and pretty much reserved to wealthy people. Regular people stuck to TI. And for that reasons, HP calculators were rarely seen in classrooms.

And when they were seen, nobody knew how to use them (I was often asked to lend mine and when they saw it was an HP, they said "oh you have one of these weird ones,never mind").

Most of what I know comes from listening to other engineers (my father's age) talk as I went through engineering school with a TI Voyage 200. That didn't have a nice manual, but it had pretty printing and could solve large systems of complex equations with ease and was almost too powerful and even came with apps (essentially a TI-89 with more RAM and a lot more buttons). I could type out a massive equation and then adjust it slightly each time. My father was dirt poor and worked in fast food full time while taking classes, and he could somehow afford one as did most of his classmates as the RPN feature would be invaluable when a TI calculator would force you to write down output from individual calculations without an X-Y-T stack (please correct me if I'm wrong though). Another advantage to owning one was some introductory programming classes would allow you to use the HP language for homework assignments. As ridiculous as this sounds, the alternative was waiting in a massive line at the computer lab to use the Unix time-sharing system (apparently the university had one of these) to run your Fortran or Pascal code.

In college I bought an HP42S. It was a wonderful calculator that like the 15C had RPN and could do statistics and matrices. It also had a display with two lines instead of just one. According to wikipedia, it's still highly in demand with used calculators selling for ~$400 on eBay.

It makes sense. If you're a scientist who has been using yours in the lab for 30+ years and one day it is ruined by the battery leaking all over the electronics, how much would you pay for a replacement? The new calculators are faster and the screens are better, but I'm surprised at the low build quality and how little features are actually available. Like why can't I run R or APL on my handheld calculator? I don't mean that strictly as the batteries wouldn't last long, but I should be able to do a variety of graphs and functions coupled with a language better than TI-Basic.

Well, you can't expect desktop software to run on something with a few tens to hundreds of K of RAM. But basically all the TI graphing calculators can be programmed in C. I don't think anyone has bothered, but there's no reason at all you couldn't run APL on one, if you either wrote or found a lightweight enough implementation.

Yea I know there's no reason something like this doesn't exist, I just felt there would be a big enough market for something like that, but in my heart I know I'm very wrong:)

For what it's worth the version of Basic offered in the TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 is probably the most interesting and powerful Basic ever released, anywhere; it supports symbolic math backed by a full CAS, declaration of pure functions, and a nifty feature that allows you to treat strings as variable names. Between that and the onboard C compiler I've never felt hog-tied, though I would love to see a practical Scheme system on one (there have been a few half-hearted attempts but "practical" is where it falls down).

Scheme would be cool. Good point bout the language too.

http://thomasokken.com/free42/

it blew my mind that you can buy an hp-15c at best buy still. it's on the shelf sort of by the cameras.

and before you start: when i feel like blowing 400 bucks on a time wasting and useless game console, you bet your ass i'm going to get shafted up close and personal whenever it tickles my fancy, i.e. at 8pm on a tuesday.

Didn't know they still had the 15c at Best Buy as that was a very limited run (yes I blew $100). Are you sure you didnt see the 12c? The 12c looks similar and is still stupidly popular in finance/accounting (it has a lot of pre-built business functions).

i think you're right, it was the 12c.

Yup, quite a few of us still use a HP-12c. I have one at my work desk and personal desk; what an absolute beauty of a device.

What?? When you feel like buying a game console, you're going to shafted at 8pm on a Tuesday? I don't understand that comment at all.

I assume he's talking about Best Buy

I was confused as well for a second before remembering my coworker talking about buying a Nintendo switch from best buy at opening.

i wasn't talking about the launch, but that's a valid reason, sure.

that means last tuesday at 8pm i said to myself, "i want a playstation". and best buy allows people to indulge in that kind of behavior (the reason i was there, and the reason i saw the calculator).

Unfortuntely I don't think that was a 15c, as it hasn't been made in a while. As GP mentioned, there was a batch made in 2012 and that sold out fast.

It was probably the 12c, the financial model, that has been continuously in production since the 80s. Unfortunately, it's much less useful for engineers than the scientific 15c.

I have a recently made 35s sitting on my desk, but I'm really itching to replace with a SwissMicros DM-15L

Ah, thank you for reminding me about those lol. I hear they're nice!

Don't know about the 15 but I bought the 41-cv as an app for my iphone. Wicked cool. I dreamt about having one when I was a kid, and now I do.

As ytcracker said:

`HP-48G. The G is for Gangster.`

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