It's starting to look like if they haven't died out in a few years, they never will. We continue to have non-general computers for a number of specific tasks; why not this one? (I have a simple button calculator on my desk - good for the occasional gut-check to make sure Excel isn't lying to me through complexity.)
I'm more curious why TI calculators hasn't been replaced by a torrent of Chinese knockoffs if there's such constant demand.
Because TI is thoroughly incorporated into all the textbooks and standardized tests, and has a monopoly there.
1.2: Because Carly Fiorina is just that good. Unless she worked for HP. I can never remember which is which.
I have my scientific calculator that I got when I was in high school right here on my desk. It's a pain sometimes, because you have to get the little solar panel in pretty direct light or it cuts off.
I thought the only function of programmable calculators rather than phone apps was that you can't take a phone with internet access/data storage into a test.
I left my beloved HP 12-S for another teacher in Samoa. I have a replacement I got on ebay, but I don't use it much.
Wow - looks like CollegeBoard is in on it, only allowing specified brands and series into SAT/AP tests.
When I was in college, all the engineering students and the like had them. I never bought one because it was something like $300 back when $300 was 1,200 chicken wings if you went on the right night.
That actually seems reasonable, given the utility of lots of things that would work as graphing calculators as cheating tools.
I'd like a TI-83 for work so I can use it in the shop without getting cutting fluids all over my phone. The phone calculator I have is pretty good but I still prefer real keys. Touch screens do a half-assed job at a bunch of different functions, so they are useful for their flexibility, but they still suck compared to use-specific interfaces.
Touch screens are just bad news for a shop, I'd think.
It looks like some of the Casio calculators on the list are much cheaper than TI.
6, 8:
As an engineer of a certain age I learned to use every possible scale on a slide rule my first year of college and then threw that baby in a lake the next year when I got a TI something-or-another. Revolutionary. And ms bill still has an HP calculator from the pre-pre-Fiorina days - she likes its use of reverse Polish notation.
I don't like to use anything fancy like a slide rule. Napier's bones works well enough.
I'm sure my dad still has his old HP somewhere. He used to bring it car shopping so he could work out the financing options for himself.
He was also head of the slide rule club at Lane Tech circa 1960.
My dad had me download an AP that copied the interface of the HP financial calculator. I think for sentimental reasons.
I used a slide rule, which I still have, exclusively for exams in Math, Physics & Chemistry in the early 70s. In one large-space exam, possibly one of the last I took, someone brought a calculator, which was the size of a thick phonebook, and took up most of the space on his tiny workspace.
Exams in those days were looking for significant figures, orders of magnitude and showing your work. Calculators wouldn't have made any of that easier. Are they different now?
In the early 90s, I know that in physics they would take off on your exam if you calculated the forces on a hanging sign and came to the conclusion that the sign was rotating.
head of the slide rule club at Lane Tech circa 1960
My HS, and probably most, had a giant slide rule about 5 feet long, which would be hung on hooks at the front of physics classrooms, and the teacher would show how to use it. I learned to read off C-inverted in HS, and never had reason to change.
Anyway, if one ball hit another ball, I could do the math. I could not work out how to do problems where nothing was moving. Maybe I was supposed to start out by assuming nothing was moving and work backward?
19: It's as if they denied the existence of barber poles.
her kids love the fact that the calculators are clunky and tactile
This bit is interesting because it makes me feel like I'm not entirely alone in disliking the "everything must look like a PADD in ST TNG" design aesthetic that seems so dominant right now. There are way more satisfying ways of making things than thin-oblong-rectangle-touchscreen, but it seems like they're almost entirely ignored, or when things that aren't suffer in comparison.
Mostly I think I'm still a little resentful that Amazon changed the original design of the Kindle. I had one of the first ones* and actually that bizarre wedge shape was really amazing for sitting around reading for hours. The newer ones (eventually I replaced mine because it was really old and getting slower and slower) just aren't as nice, even if they do look pretty as opposed to ridiculous.
I still have my 12-C, but I almost never use it.
Buttons are way better than screen taps - you can tell if you actually hit a button (the various tap-response widgets like Apple has been trying out might maybe make this better), which is good for speed and accuracy (My own least favorite design trend hatred is for blue LEDs in things; I hope that passes soon).
I have an HP32s, but I don't carry it around; the phone app I use when I'm out and about is similarly RPN, though.
Could we have fewer nerd abbreviations dropped in without context? Normal people take a long time to decode "ST TNG" unless you mention Picard or something.
I just realized that since I no longer teach SAT/ACT prep, I no longer need my TI-83! I need to see how much used ones go for online.
And now that I've checked on eBay, I think I'll just send it to Togolosh for free. E-mail me if you want the calculator.
I love calculators for all the tactile and confirmation reasons above. You know what else is really fun to use? An adding machine! Clicky buttons and whirring paper and an instant printout right there!
Also, I love that it's called an adding machine. You can picture the first time someone said, "Eureka! A machine that adds!"
For good measure, the wholly mechanical adding machines where you had to haul a lever after pushing the buttons.
My dad described working with one. It wasn't around the office by the time I was old enough to visit. I had to content myself with the copier, the phones, and the machine that wrote checks.
I played with my parents' adding machine as a kid but now I realize I have no idea what they use it for, or even whether it was mostly mom or dad. (They did use it, though.)
The check-writing machine was great fun because it embossed the numbers into your check. I guess it was an anti-forgery thing. Or maybe to make embezzlement harder because you could only write checks on the machine and the machine was locked.
26: But that was only in there because I thought there might be someone lame enough not to immediately know what a PADD was!
I once grabbed some sort of adding machine-like device form a dumpster, but its motor was busted (it made a horrible smell when you plugged it in) and I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work anyway. It had something like 8 rows of the numbers 1-10. Like, did it enable you to add ten single-digit numbers at once? Is that so useful?
26: Thank you.
35: That would be me.
My cellphone's name is PADD because I didn't want to have it called "Barry Freed's Cellphone" which was the default. Also I'm a huge Star Trek nerd.
A good friend's dad has a sweet-ass Curta. Much cooler than a cellphone by any name.
Having just graded yesterday's in-class exam --- the first one I've given in years --- I can attest that Kids These Days are unable to find the following without a calculator, even when explicitly told it's ok to stop at the second significant digit:
- logarithm, base 10, of one million.
- 100/60.6
- 100/25.2
- 900*2.59
I am, apparently, in the running for History's Greatest Monster for asking them to do the first one.
I should add that by Kids These Days, I mean juniors and seniors in statistics, computer science, economics, business and mathematics at Robberbaron Bloodmoney University.
I use base-100/60.5, so at least one is easy.
39: I want a Curta so bad. The history behind it is fascinating, and the device itself is so cool.
It turns out for some time my dad had to do payroll for the employees under him, despite that not being his line of work at all, and that entailed bringing an adding machine home and totting stuff up. He hated it.
I guess this violates the sanctity of OBC, but a former commenter once referred to getting an old programmable calculator onto the internet as having attained nerdvana.
+1 for tactile button feedback. I loved my hp41 and 12c. The 12c was still ubiquitous amongst banking folks until very recently.
If I was 10 years old and had Soulver and Wolfram Alpha on my iPod, I would think those 'calculator' machines to be ancient.