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by joezydeco 2503 days ago
Free42 is also available for iOS and Android. It's very handy, especially when I can keep my real 42S safe in a drawer at home.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomasokke...

1 comments

The rendering on that 42s is close enough that I can almost feel the buttons. Never thought I'd describe a calculator as sensual, but HP's of that era had such a distinct look and feel.
This is a great find. I used a 42S heavily through high school and college. I was surprised at how some of the muscle memory of how I did certain things came back. Seeing the dot matrix answer after doing some calculations brought back the feeling of being bored in math class, when I would just play with all the functions and write little programs. I didn't have a phone or even a laptop to turn to in those days.

Even now though, it will be useful to do calculations in RPN. Even the ability to swap X and Y, and store intermediate results in order to avoid parentheses or M buttons is nice.

I felt the same way. And once you're comfortable with RPN, it's really hard to go back. Painful, even.