I wish I could find it, I found among the treasures in the house a slide rule, not a full featured one, but it did the basics, and it had a little sheet carefully folded to fit in the case with it which explained how to use it. Always one for an intellectual challenge, I taught myself to use it by following the instructions. Where it's gotten to now I have no idea, nor do I readily recall how to use one.
Physical calculators, I have none, my last one was the great Casio engineering one I used in college and right up until my then 2 or 3 year old 'hid' it by putting in a table lamp, sitting on top of the bulb. Which promptly melted through the case, which was half the buttons, before I noticed it in there (by the smell of melting plastic). Back in the day I lusted after the TI-59 and TI-58. I did end up with a TI-57 in high school - another one I wish I could find, I still have the manual that came with it, and even the charger, but not the actual calculator. Since as things went, I didn't end up working as an EE much after graduation, I don't do many complex calculations, and just use the calculator in Windows, or one my phone if I'm not at a computer. Having all that math background that goes with an EE degree, I do most basic math in my head. Contrast to my GF, who is always asking me things like "If I did 8 hours on Monday, and 9 hours on Tuesday, and 6 hours on Wednesday, how much is that?" and always keeps a physical calculator on her desk to add up numbers.
TI pretty much has a lock on schools. I don't know if they still have this stuff, but my ex wife is a 6th grade math and science teacher, and she used to have classroom sets of TI calculators plus a special clear teacher model to put on an overhead projector and project the display on the screen. In higher grades they had TI-30's. But after my TI-57, I had a brief fling with the TRS-80 pocket computers, and then went to the Casio engineering models, my first one was the Radio Shack version of one of them, then I replaced that with the one that got melted, which had all sorts of physical constants stored plus did number base conversions for programming and basic logic. Which also brings up another point, since my first computer was a single board system that you programmed directly in hex, I learned the conversion between hex and decimal quite well and usually do conversions in my head with hex, decimal, and binary. Since I didn't learn on an 8080, my octal is pretty weak. Most kids these days seem to have a lot of trouble with base conversions, it's just not something there is much need for until you start poking around the innards of microcontrollers and similar programmable devices. It's a different world when you've always had computers and smartphones. Us old-timers remember that stuff first appearing - I was 14 when I built my first computer. There were others available, but nothing I could afford.
So to return to the subject, it's not so much that TI had better calculators, it's that they supplied heavily to the education market (see the part about the classroom calculators). HP and RPN always ere somewhat of a specialty device not commonly seen outside of professional engineering (and sometimes business) applications. I did learn to use an RPN calculator as self defense, as most of my college professors had the 48C or some variant, and were all too happy to loan it to you if yours went dead in the middle of an exam. But since most has TI's, they were totally lost on how to use the HP. I never had to, my Casio never let me down. HPs were also a lot more expensive. And a true algebraic calculator, not a simple 4 banger type, is usually easier for most people compared to learning RPN - you can just key in the equation as printed and be confident the order of operations will be followed. No thinking.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
