Ten classic electronic calculators from the 1970s and 1980s Until sometime in the early 1980s, when you reached secondary school you were handed a slim book full of numbers during a maths lesson and taught how to use log tables. Sines, cosines, tangents, square roots - they were all in there too. While it made a change from long division, it caused its own share of headaches. But, to a …
Surely one of the most used calculators when I was at school. Played an annoying version of "When the Saints go marching in", plus that really addictive match-the-numbers-and-make-multiples-of-10-to-get-a-bonus-n-character-game. We used to play, highest score for 1 or 3 waves of numbers, and those who really couldn't stop playing disconnected the speaker so they could play during class.
Finish 10 waves of numbers and the screen shifted to the left by one segment for the next 10 waves, then back for the next, as the speed increased. I am pretty sure there were 99 waves before the game reverted back to where it started.
People could walk and play the game at the same time, ISTR. Those +/= buttons got a good pounding. Picked one up a at a boot sale, just for the memories. I still suck at the game.
Then there is the boxing match calculator, BG-15.....
My TI-59 didn't survive being run over and was replaced by a fx-550 which saw me through to university when I replaced it with a Prime (it wasn't, strictly speaking, my Prime, but I loved it nonetheless).
I couldn't find my old Casio when I came to guide my nephew and niece through their GCSEs and A-levels so I was a little pleased to find myself shopping for a scientific calculator once more.
I'd lambast you for shameless nostalgia, but well, when I were a lass it were all mainframes with discrete components round here ...
Joining secondary school in the mid 90s I remember one of the requirements was a Casio FX-82.
It looked like it had barely changed in 15 years, but if it did the job then it was ripe for the job.
I also remember in the 80s in primary school, someone had a calculator that had a vivid red LED display, it was a thing of beauty.
Remember teachers saying that mental arithmetic was important?
That we wouldn't be carrying calculators with us everyday?
I look at my mobile phone, with calculator, spreadsheet and internet connectivity functionality, and laugh to myself.
We got to use calculators from year-8 with the 2xAA battery-powered FX-82 as the standard. Even better was when my younger brother go to year 8 and I offloaded my '82 on him and got myself a FX-115m (that is the one in the article photo, though not in the article!). Had all the binary, octal and hex modes that a budding computer geek needed (at least that is what I convinced my mum of).
It also had solar cells running the display but an internal button-cell running the actual chip, so when smart-arses covered the solar cells while walking past my desk, I didn't loose what I was in the middle of. Suckers!
Still have it right here and last used it just 2 days ago. It is on its third button-cell in [redacted] decades!
There's a TI5x emulator for Android as well, emulates the TI 58/59 family.
I highly recommend a read of Ken Shirriff's blog on reverse engineering and emulating the origiinal Sinclair Scientific, as well:
http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simulator.html
I have one of those emulators on my PC at work...and still own my HP41C, as well as the HP25 it replaced. The HP25 is a nice little unit: solid, LED readout and programmable. Runs on two AA cells. It got me through grad school. Before that, I had a Bowmar 4-banger and a slide rule for the trig functions.
I prefer the HP-15c, and it has it's Android andro11c emulator also (the HP-11C actually, but they're nearly identical)
Then there is also the HP-15C emulator for computers.
These have put my real HP-15C to rest, even though it still works perfectly (aaahh, those keys were a pleasure to type on)
For me it was the FX 502 P with the strange yellow LCD, whatever happened to them? Unlike the 602P you had to look at the program as its mnemonics - the digits and the letters C,E,F and P, IIRC.
Who remembers Dick Pountain's column in PCW? There were strange tricks you could do to exploit a bug in the firmware to display some of the letters and put the digits 1 to 4 in the first character of the exponent i.e. you could display 1 E 499.
Ah the FX-502! And its cassette cradle. And the Kraftwerk track, supposedly composed on one. ("I am the operator of my pocket calculator")
In order, I learned programming on: the Sinclair Cambridge, TI-57 and finally the FX502-P before graduating to "real" computers. I remember being shocked at the 6502 processor in a SYM-1 not having multiply and divide instructions (not to mention trig) while the lowly TI-57 had.
O tempora, o mores!
I'd forgotten the cradle - thanks for reminding me - and those music overlays for the keypad to help in composition. I wrote some almost-melodic sequences for mine and then set it off while I strummed along with my electric guitar and multi-tracked onto a stereo cassette tape deck.
Ah, nostalgia. Although I don't know where my nost is, I'm happy to experience the algia it gets whenever I trek back mentally some 35 years.
Extracting from (dusty) archives...
YES! Dick Pountain - the man who published my first "real" program and fed my ego :) I think he offered me seventy quid for the accompanying article, achieved by sticking a cheque for the same in with the letter that asked me if I minded if he published, and as I recall the issue in which it was published arrived the same day in the mail.
The program was a version of Tic-Tac-Toe for the Casio fx502P and Dick seemed to think it was worth examining the code (he made nice comments, which fed my ego even more :)). I've long since lost the issue of PCW (rest in peace) in which it appeared but it was a treasured relic for many years. If I could find a scan of the article online that would be great - I could show my wife what I've been boasting about all these years :) - but it still eludes me.
Truth be told, what got me started in my ongoing addiction to programming was the Sinclair Cambridge. An hour after I bought it (at Boots, in Oxford, I think), while I was buried deep in the manual the bus I was riding was hit head-on by a truck carrying 12 tons of road gravel - one way to have a baptism of fire, so to speak. Some programmers are born, some are made, some have it hammered into them at 50 mph.
I owned or used at work some of the great machines discussed here - Sinclair Cambridge and a couple of other models whose manufacturers' names I can't recall, Casios 201p, 502p, and 702p; an HP 97c (the one with the programmable strips and inbuilt printer and that wonderful RPN that confused an entire department at the University of Oxford but yours truly cracked it :)) and a bunch of others after that (again, memory fails me) until I transitioned into "home computers" - a whole other saga :)
But, all hail Dick Pountain. Also Paul Liptrot for different reasons, and Wendy Wilson/Hunter and Trevor Hood at what was Castle House Publishing, for even more different reasons. One of these days I'll raise a monument to them all (and the countless others who helped me become what I am today - ..er.. - homeless and unemployed in Los Angeles. But still addicted to programming :)).
> Dick Pountain - the man who published my first "real" program and fed my ego :) ... The program was a version of Tic-Tac-Toe for the Casio fx502P
I'm not worthy, truly you are a god amongst programmers!
I remember the article well, but no I don't have a copy. That was a remarkable piece of code, if I'd owned a hat I'd have taken it off for you then.
In 1972 I was doing A-levels, and I asked for (and got) a set of 7-figure log tables for Xmas. Man, was I a rebel! They're still around somewhere.
Then went to Uni in 1974 and got a Sinclair Scientific (the log tables were easier to use...)
Mid 80s got a Casio fx451 (the one that could handle Hex) and it's still in my desk drawer and still works.
I think I've still got mine in a drawer somewhere - don't know if it still works though. I coded up a very simple drawing program to entertain myself in boring lessons, and the program function was excellent for cheating in exams, as the "program" slot could be used to store useful formulae instead :)
Of course 58008 works just as well without turning it over as 80085, but 58008618, 5318008 etc only work upside down.
I remember getting a Casio fx450 which did base convertion and logic functions and had a new kind of fun working out what naughty words you could make with the hex digits - even without turning it over b00b5, b19b00b5, b00b1e5, etc. Bonus points for working it out and entering it in decimal and then pressing the hex conversion key
My fx-550 finally gave up the ghost six or seven years ago. The modern calculator I bought to replace it just doesn't seem as intuitive.
I've still got my log tables, though. I used to be able to make good approximations purely with mental arithmetic, having memorised the logs of 2, 3 and 5, working by interpolation between those and their multiples (but I can only remember log 2 now). I've also got my dad's slide rule tucked away in a box somewhere, although I never really taught myself to use it properly.
Indeed, I still have (and prefer) my fx-570c to a newer model that tries to do things in some sort of procedural way (i.e. you have to enter 'sin' '0.5' '=' and not that stack-based '0.5' 'sin' sort of way).
I prefer the stack-style as often you compute something, and then want its log, etc, and it is annoying not to just press 'log' and get the result of computing it on what is currently on display.
I'd bought a slide rule (10 shillings with the discount we were allowed as students) in '67 for my first year at the grammar school. (4 weeks pocket money!) I used this throughout the next 5 years; although I still had to use log tables.
I remember when the first of the Casio calculators was brought in by someone; we actually organised some tests to see who could do the calculations quicker, those with slide rules or the electronic device. (Damn, we were sad!) Because of complexity in operations, slide rules tended to win to begin with, but as people became more familiar with the set-up, they started to get faster.
After I started work, it was mostly mental arithmetic and manual addition. 8-(
> then what does that make its junior family members, the TI-58 and TI-57?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-57
Thanks for the link.
The Ti-57 is where I started programming, The lab where my father worked had one and he'd borrow it for me to play on.
Then my brother got a CBM programmable calculator which had more "steps" and memories so I'd beg that from him.
...was the Casio FX-7000G.
You weren't permitted to take it into any Scottish O grade or higher maths exam unless it had been factory reset prior to entering the exam room. The calculator was very popular up until that time as you could program in all the "harder to remember" formulae before entering the exam.
This was kind of amusing as you could do the same to some extent with the FX-550 (which I used for 15 years or so) but the graphing functions on the FX-7000G freaked the examiners/invigilators out enough to ban it :)
Here's a tiny clue for you - O grades/highers are not the same as o levels/a levels. Its not even the same educational system so I repeat it WAS the first "banned" calculator in Scotland. Edit - it was specifically named as such along with a TI calc added about a month later.
Repeat as much as you like. The de facto standard was no calculators either in scotland or england and in some exams scottish or otherwise calculators of any description are still not allowed.
weird that,
from Google, the fx-7000G came out in '85.
At that point, I'd been an escapee from the drudge that was the Scottish secondary education system for a couple of years, but during the fun time I had, I'd used various Ti. HP and Casios (including programmables)* in exams from around '78 onwards, though they insisted that any programmable had it's batteries taken out and reinserted before the start of the exam...old school thinking at it's best.
My last school Casio, a fx-3600P purchased in '82 a couple of days before my CSYS exams as a replacement for the sadly unremembered model HP programmable calculator which inconveniently attained the blessed state of fubar. The Casio survived almost daily use up till the late 90's, in fact, it may still be working somewhere out there, but as some fscker 'borrowed' it from my workbench circa '98, I'll never know.
I've currently got a couple of el-cheapo Olympia scientific calculators from Lidl lying around at work for those occasions when I need one, I really must invest in a decent calculator again for home use.
*I'm not including either the Texets (I spit at the memories) or National Semiconductor Novus calculators I had, the Novus calculators were great fun (my first one was a Mathbox 650 back in '74-75) but you had to be careful, as they weren't that stable (some of the factory rejects made for great practical joke items, with all sorts of fun faults like multiplying any number by a decimal setting the calculator into a countdown from a large random number, 2+2=7 etc.)
I remember having my Casio calculator watch taken off me before a maths exam in the mid 80`s. Calculators were not allowed in the exams for the city & guilds maths modules i did.
You were allowed them in other subjects like physics or engineering though, just not maths (which stands to reason really).
Apparently the school had problems with people using sharp (and other) programmable watches to cheat in exams by loading them full of likely answers via the address book functions, and so calculator (or any funky looking) watches were always comfiscated before (or during if you managed to hide it under your sleeve and teach noticed it later) exams as you couldnt remove the battery and the teachers had no idea what functions the watch had hidden upon it. Calculators were inspected for cheating potential beforehand and a bunch of roving teachers scanned the room constantly looking for cheats during the exam.
"I had a RPM calculator back in the late 70's, it was a Novus. I've never seen or heard of them since."
Hooray! Another person in the world who had one of these.The big advantage was the rest of the kids never borrowed my calculator as it didn't have an equals sign! Mine still works ...
I used nothing but slipsticks - including circular and tubular types - and the fabled book of tables, until my O-levels in 1976. Got a Sinclair Scientific sometime between then and the A-levels a couple of years later; no-one *ever* borrowed that calculator a second time. It ended up wired in as a maths co-processor on a 6502 system, driving the switches with CMOS contacts and reading the multiplexed display... absolutely no use whatsoever but it did, just, work.
Got an HP11 mid-eighties (I had to change the batteries last year, shock), but it's still my reach-for calculator, and I have an HP41 at home, and another HP whose number I forget but which eats really unusual batteries - HP31 perhaps? LED display...
Stack logic is built in so much now I can't even drive these 'show the equation' calculators; anything with an equals key throws me! I don't use the programmability of them these days, but for general use, there's nothing to beat an HP calculator.
I have an HP29C somewhere: LED display, RPN of course, and programmable (and one of the example programs in the manual is that moon lander one). At some point the batteries wouldn't hold charge anymore, to the point where it wouldn't even power up running off the mains adapter. But after a brief interlude with a pocket knife, two AA NiCads and some glue, it was fully functional again. I'll probably have to redo that trick when I find it.
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