General > General Technical Chat
What calculator do you use ?
caroper:
I think my first calculator was the Facit 1114J http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/eec/calcpics/Facit1114J/view.jpg
I think i was still faster with my trusty Guessing Stick (Slide Rule for the young players), but it got me interested in the whole electronics / logic / computers field. The rest is history as they say :)
Kilroy:
--- Quote from: lavo-1 on April 17, 2012, 08:14:42 pm ---Not sure I understand you buddy.
To input that sum in my old Casio fx-570CD would take 8 strokes :P
ie:5 shift 5 + 5 shift 6 =
--- End quote ---
Exactly. But they don't make that puppy any more. Which is a shame.
m12lrpv:
I started with a HP11c which is all I could afford in Uni, then on to a 32S and then a 32SII.
The lifespan of my calculators increased significantly after I stopped working as a Surveyor and my current calculator (my second HP32SII ) is now 20 years old and going as strong as ever.
One of the greatest advantages of RPN is when people ask to borrow your calculator :)
Ajahn Lambda:
You guys are spoiled. Here's mine.
j/k ;D
I have two dead TI graphing calculators, killed while going through engineering school: a TI-86, and a TI-89. By 'die' I mean their screens malfunctioned and the keypads became non-functional. One's screen died in the middle of my statics exam; I beat my fist against its face to get it to work, which made for a hell of a scene in the middle of a test, I assure you. I am probably the most-careful person in the world with his electronic devices, so the fact that they died within two years of purchase really made me hate TI. How many years went by before they updated or replaced the TI-86 or TI-89 models? A decade? Ridiculous, especially given that the cost to the end-user almost never changed, yet the technology in parts used became ubiquitous, if not obsolete. It was almost as if TI refused to let the early-1990s die. I found them to be non-intuitive, clunky, slow, inefficient (they go through batteries like a mofo), but worst of all they were required for a few classes.
That said, the best calculator I've ever used is my Casio from 1997-ish. I'm away from home right now, so I can't look at it and tell you what the model number is exactly, but it has a three-color screen, a teal case, and it's in the CFX-9850 series. It looks much like this one, from the Wikipedia page:
That was a great calculator, despite being a bit slow and REALLY hating cold weather. But the ubiquity of the TI units, and programs written specifically for engineering with it, pushed me to begrudgingly buy a refurbished TI-89 Titanium. Happily it has held up well, but I keep it in a zip-up padded case anyway. It seems to be much improved over the regular TI-89, and I enjoy using it as long as I don't have to bust out the manual to finger out TI's silly coding and key sequences for operations.
My short list of most commonly used calculators is as follows:
1. Excel -- much of what I do is done easiest with a spreadsheet and graphics
2. Win7 built-in calculator (whoever thought to make it do binary and hexadecimal, THANK YOU!)
3. My Android -- there is some great calculator software out there now! I use Arity, RealCalc, TechCalc, and a couple others.
4. MATLAB
5. Mathematica
6. MathCAD
7. That TI-89 Titanium
slateraptor:
--- Quote from: lavo-1 on April 17, 2012, 09:34:25 pm ---Sorry I don't follow you question.
If I was to put in 0.005000005 [shift] [7] and then [=] it would show 5.000005 K. note (key 7 being Meg)
and the same with 5000005 [shift] [5] [=] 5.000005 K. note (key 5 being milli)
--- End quote ---
For the HP 35s, 5.000005 K would be displayed as 5.000005e3. If I wanted to display this output in milli-units, I would press [<--] [ENG -->] once to display 5,000.005e0, and again [<--] [ENG -->] to display 5,000,005e-3
So suppose you've just performed a calculation whose result is 5.000005 K. Now suppose you would like to easily determine what this number is in milli-units. Does the calculator have a dedicated feature for performing this task similar to the [ENG <--] / [ENG -->] f'n on the 35s?
I've noticed that the engineering mode for every calculator I've used would "auto range" the engineering exponent based on a coefficient which lies between 1 <= coefficient < 1000, e.g. an absolute result of 0.1234 would be displayed as 123.4e-3, whereas an absolute result of 1.234 would be displayed unchanged.
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