But can your calculator run Linux? | Hacker News Reader

But can your calculator run Linux?

raymii.org

115 pointsjandeboevrie14 comments

I use the Prime G2 daily. I VERY much prefer RPN, love that I can program it with Python (and occasionally PPL,) and am often in environments where having a backlit screen is a lot more convenient than pulling out a flashlight. Linux on it would be a fun novelty, but the clunkiness would make it a lot less useful to me. The big collection of physical buttons behaving predictably without needing to look at the screen is super useful. Otherwise I’d just use my phone.

Install emacs with gnuplot and run M-x calc.

And reprogram all of the keys to do the things they already do so I can wind up with the same exact functionality I had before, only with more steps? Probably not. I’m using a calculator because it’s a more efficient task-specific interface for computation.

These calculators are, without question, excellent little devices and the HP ones in particular had great engineering behind them. I had an HP48 in undergrad, which was considered pretty much mandatory for engineering. There was a thriving student sneakernet of programs you could get that would trivialize certain problems. Some friends had the HP49G which was, in my opinion, a step down in terms of build quality. Years later I bought an HP50 which was the best of both worlds.

I still have my HP50 but there's just no reason to use it. Anywhere I go I either have my phone or a computer. When I was in the air force I would have to go into EMSEC zones where you couldn't bring external devices, such as SCIFs, but the number of people with needs to be running engineering calculations in such an environment rounds down to 0. Certainly I wasn't one of them.

Even "in the field" nowadays, you're likely to have satellite connectivity and a laptop. There's just not really a use case for graphing calculators that I can think of. It's too bad, because they're awesome.

I still have my 50g on my work desk for one reason - to do calculations with units. Admittedly I use emulation on my phone mostly, but the 48-50 units calculations are still the best I’ve used. (But if I don’t need units I use my SM 42).

MathCAD or GNU units work well enough for me

If a toaster can run on Linux,

so can a calculator.

(NetBSD used to have that slogan with regards to toasters. I have not followed it for several years, so I don't know which operating system dominates toasters nowadays.)

A toaster can run Linux. Linux can run on a toaster.

There was not a "slogan" but an inside joke, and you've reversed the sense of said joke.

In response to the joke about BSD running on a toaster, some joker created and documented a "toaster running BSD" which was accomplished by bypassing the toaster circuits and adding a motherboard with CPU, memory, storage and I/O.

Now those all make for good jokes, but it does not mean that toaster hardware is POSIX-ready, any more than a Macintosh SE is suitable as an aquarium.

But let us never forget that the Video Toaster runs with Amiga or Windows!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

I’ve had the HP lineage from the HP 49G all the way to the current HP Prime G2, and I have to say: these are excellent devices.

Yes, in fact it can.

[1] https://calculinux.org/

For that project to work, you have to replace the brains of the PicoCalc with something that can run Linux, so you might as well just connect the display of a Ti-84 up to a Raspi with an adapter board and advertise it as "running Linux".

But can your Linux run calculator?

Poor calculator

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