Do programmable (as in basic or C programmable) calculators still exist?

[alank2]

You must have some really good reason not get a $5 Android phone then.

I despise them.  The little screen, the virtual keyboard that never chooses the right character, the UI, pretty much everything about them I despise.

[nidlaX]

You must have some really good reason not get a $5 Android phone then.

I despise them.  The little screen, the virtual keyboard that never chooses the right character, the UI, pretty much everything about them I despise.

Hehe. To be honest, I think the pocket computers of the late 80s / early 90s are pretty cool. What we need is a modern clamshell form factor Android / Linux handheld with a qwerty keyboard, ala the Shield with a keyboard instead of a game pad.

[eugenenine]

I have Casio's, HPs and TIs sitting in bins, virtually never used.  Only slightly more often than my slide rule.  With desktops, laptops and smartphones there is almost never a time when the calculator is the best or most convenient tool.

You'll pry my HP48 from my cold dead hands

But seriously, even though I have droid48 and use it when its easier to grab my phone from my pocket, when I want to do real work nothing has the same feel as the Hp48 series.

[alank2]

Hehe. To be honest, I think the pocket computers of the late 80s / early 90s are pretty cool.

  - I agree - I loved those pocket computers (and still do).  I wish they still made them.

What we need is a modern clamshell form factor Android / Linux handheld with a qwerty keyboard, ala the Shield with a keyboard instead of a game pad.

That would be pretty cool.

[eugenenine]

Hehe. To be honest, I think the pocket computers of the late 80s / early 90s are pretty cool.

  - I agree - I loved those pocket computers (and still do).  I wish they still made them.

What we need is a modern clamshell form factor Android / Linux handheld with a qwerty keyboard, ala the Shield with a keyboard instead of a game pad.

That would be pretty cool.

Sounds like we need an open source hardware project to 3dprint a case/keyboard with a raspberry pi zero inside.

[AlxDroidDev]

What we need is a modern clamshell form factor Android / Linux handheld with a qwerty keyboard, ala the Shield with a keyboard instead of a game pad.

That's not hard to achieve at all. I have a tiny bluetooth keyboard and a tiny bluetooth mouse connected to my Android Phone. I can put the phone on any position and use the k+m to control the phone as I would any tiny computer.  The advantage is that each device has its own power.

I often use that method with SSH clients like SSHDroid or ConnectBot.

If your phone is rooted, there is also the option to install BusyBox, which gives a lot of power to shell scripts. Or you can simply program in Pascal, for example!

[bson]

I'm not sure a programmable calculator is that terribly useful today, given how easy it is to use say google sheets on a tablet, storing it to gdrive so it's available anywhere and can use data also in gsheets on the same gdrive.  A calculator today is more for bench tasks IMO (3.5V supply, 1.75V forward LED voltage, what resistor to pick for 3.5mA kind of thing).  I have an HP35S which is absolutely perfect for this since it has native display and support for complex numbers, so allows very quickly and easily say find the cutoff frequency for a small passive network, or to switch it around and determine a specific component value to get a specific -6 or -3 dBV/dBm cutoff.  For anything much more complex I either use a tablet and Wolfram Alpha or on a computer use python and numpy/scipy/sympy.  I also have Mathematica for OS X but hardly ever use it; I like python better, in particular that it runs anywhere without license managers, doesn't cost a fortune, and doesn't cost a second fortune just to be programmable.  (And to me programmability for this kind of software is more important than a good UI.)  But for quick, simple calculations... HP35S.  Good 2-line screen, small, lightweight, and a good nearly HP67/HP41 grade keyboard.

This said, I'm a longtime handheld calculator fan and together with a few others reverse engineered the ROM in the HP48 in the early 90s.  To that end I wrote an annotating disassembler with an emacs mode to edit the disassembly (comments, symbol names, pattern substitution for code segments into macros) and save the annotations in a sidecar file; a macro assembler that could reassemble the annotated disassemblies; and a debugger (MLDB) that could single-step ROM code (which is challenging because like a PIC the processor had a fixed hardware stack and no hardware breakpoint support), mainly as a reverse engineering aid.  (The debugger was sold on an expansion card through EduCalc for a while, enough to recoup some dev costs and then open sourced a couple of years later.)  Eventually, at a conference (in Corvallis, OR) that was well-attended by the HP calc engineers I chatted a bunch with them and it turned out they had bought a bunch of these and used it themselves.   Before the conference was over someone had dropped a pile of floppies in my coat pocket with the calculator source code on it, with the comment that this never happened.  Fun times! But the days of the handheld calculator as a numerical computing tool I think are long since gone.  The best I think would be a release of something like Octave for tablets with a nice touchy UI.

[eugenenine]

Have you ever tried to use Google sheets?  Even on a fast computer with a fast internet connection its barely useable.  I can wait for AndropenOffice to load and do work on my tablet and its still faster than google sheets/docs.

[bson]

By the way, the new HP Prime looks interesting, but it's still very much targeting an educational environment as supposed to the lab bench.  The Prime has wifi, so add LXI Host support to it, and make it a one or two button press to grab a reading from a DMM or the complex trace data from a VNA, like it is in python (using python-vxi11).  Reduce the number of buttons (most of which have nothing to do with cascaded calculations) and increase the screen size.  Drop the silly algebraic calculator mode (not Bressard's excellent algebraic solver) and rearrange the keys to target cascaded calculations.  Add automatic script capture: turn a chain of calculations into a script and then let me point and say which values are inputs, which is a temporary result, and which are outputs.  Let me attach methods to obtain the inputs (e.g. DMM reading, or decade series number generator), and methods of visualizing outputs (e.g. leave on the stack with a specific tag and unit, or graph relative to one of the inputs on a dB log scale).

[bson]

Have you ever tried to use Google sheets?  Even on a fast computer with a fast internet connection its barely useable.  I can wait for AndropenOffice to load and do work on my tablet and its still faster than google sheets/docs.

Really?  Works just fine for me.  I do a lot of macros and calculations in them, no problems at all.

[eugenenine]

Have you ever tried to use Google sheets?  Even on a fast computer with a fast internet connection its barely useable.  I can wait for AndropenOffice to load and do work on my tablet and its still faster than google sheets/docs.

Really?  Works just fine for me.  I do a lot of macros and calculations in them, no problems at all.

Its not the calculations, its just typing and/or navigating.  I've not bothered with it recently but tried both Firefox and Chromium and it was just sloooow in either.

[MrSlack]

I've actually just installed RealCalc (paid up version) on my android handset, stuck it in RPN mode and it's just about perfect.

That and google sheets for me now.

[eugenenine]

Anyone ever tried to 3dprint a keypad similar to a calculator?