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by poyu 2964 days ago
I really really like HP calculators. The only one I have now is the HP-35s, a new version of HP-35.

Once you go RPN, you can never go back! I have PCalc (another piece of amazing software) on my phone for RPN.

It feels really stupid for others to see that I can't operate a normal calculator.

4 comments

As someone who switched away from RPN (well RPL) I disagree. I was an HP48/50 series fanboy since about 1995 and before that RPN on a HP41. I was the weird kid at school who didn’t have a normal calculator and the teachers couldn’t help me.

However I bought a Casio FX991EX recently after using my daughter’s unit which has a modern entry system, solver, engineering units, conversions and dual power. It’s pretty much perfect. Anything else more complicated, I roll out python, scipy, sympy etc.

Yea, it's much easier to enter a matrix on a modern Casio than the HP calcs and requires fewer keystrokes I believe. I guess navigation of the indices takes up time on the Casio, but it is so intuitive.
The FX991EX is just awesome!
I highly recommend anyone to convert to RPN but it does make you feel like a idiot when you can't use a normal calculator for the minute it takes to switch back over to normal. I find it doubly frustrating though to use a normal one because I know now the forbidden fruit of how calculators can be improved and college sometimes prevents me from using it.
Yeah, PCalc is the best one out there, but still no substitute for a real one.

I can’t bring my phone into work, so still heavily rely on the real ones.

My ultimate one would be some sort of OLED display for each key, so they could be programmed. There still isn’t one yet that has my ideal key layout.

I love the HP-35s. Having common conversions at the press of a button is really convenient.

Here's the buglist for the HP-35s: http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/articles.cg...