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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

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rgrieselhuber

I've been surprised that there hasn't been a good, programmable calculator app gain wide traction.

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I left my HP42S in the drawer at home and now use the Free42 simulator on iOS. It's insanely handy.

http://thomasokken.com/free42/

I know some here have mentioned the 48G, the 42S was always a bit more useful and compact for my day-to-day use.

I used an HP41C for many years (replacing an HP55). I found it had a better key feel than later models. I bought an HP28S at some point but I never much cared for it and, to tell the truth, didn't need a graphing calculator at that point anyway.

I only used a TI for one year in college. This was during the period when calculator prices were dropping very quickly and between entering college and becoming a sophomore HP prices dropped to something relatively affordable and I never looked back.

It doesn't have the key feel obviously but I use an HP41 emulator on my iPhone.

As a denizen of HN, maybe you're the kind of person to have been exposed to "synthetic programming" on the HP41?

The phrase "synthetic programming" certainly brings back fond memories for me. Something about entering a weird but valid program instruction, then removing a memory module and power cycling to forcibly corrupt the RAM and build the initial wedge to then enter the synthetic codes?

I think I actually bought a book on the topic at one point but never ended up doing a lot with it. Unfortunately my HP41 is pretty much dead at this point (battery leak and a flaky key) and it's one of those things I can't really justify replacing. (And, like assembly language, I think I'll probably keep HP calculator programming in the "it was cool at the time" bucket :-))

One of the first things I install on all my phones is Andie Graph. It provides very good emulation of all the Z80 based TI calcs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.supware.ti...

http://calca.io/ doesn't have graphing, but it's pretty wonderful otherwise.

(But FWIW, I'd rather see general-purpose programming become easier to use than calculators become more complex.)

TI afficionados should check out GraphNCalc83 for iOS.

Behaves like a modern calculator should (touch interactive, colorized graphs), no ROM shenanigans necessary, and a very familiar interface. All the TI-83 programs I've thrown at it have worked so far.

Graph89 is a port of a TI-89 emulator to Android. Works quite well. You need a ROM image from a calculator, but TI actually has them for download on the website, which saves effort.

You can't use phones to take tests.

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