[wscott]

Some of these comments are "my first HP".

I bought an HP-28C in when I graduated from high school using my own money. It was $235 which was a lot of money for me. My parents thought I was crazy. I later upgraded to the 28S followed by the 48sx.

At college, I would enter and win the "Calculator Olympics". They would give you these super complicated algebraic expressions to evaluate. The TI people would lose track of all the parentheses and the older HPs would exceed the 4-level stack.

I was amused a couple years ago to discover many of my old programs are still preserved on the internet: https://www.hpcalc.org/authors/166 POLY was hugely popular at the time. I just wrote it to simplify my classwork.

[nealabq]

My father worked at HP in the 70s in Tool&Die, and made some of the molds for plastic pieces of the HP 35. He bought an HP 21 in '76. It's now my son's.

It still works perfectly, except the battery is lost so we run a wire into the battery compartment.

It's the most intuitive calculator I've ever used.