I figured I’d dust off my little collection of vintage calculators from the mid 1970’s up through the mid 1980’s and have a look at them. As they say, three out of four ain’t bad. The list:
- Lloyd’s “Accumatic” 305
- Texas Instruments TI-55
- Texas Instruments TI-1200
- Hewlett Packard HP-28S
The Lloyd’s and the TI-1200 just fired right up and acted like they were supposed to. I do think its kind of funny that they needed to put instructions on the back. I guess if you hadn’t ever used an electronic calculator like this in c. 1975 it might seem a little weird, but whatever.
The TI-55, though. Nothing. I figured I’d crack it open and have a look. First all the foam backing from the keys fell out in a cloud of nasty and probably toxic dust. Eww. After a bit of futzing around it appears the main chip, which makes up the entirety of the system (save for a single capacitor and a single resistor) appears to just have a dead short across the power.
The HP-28S is one of those calculators I absolutely despised in my high school and college days. Why?
Reverse Polish Notation.
Like I say in the video, I can see how you might want to use this if you’re doing assembly programming, or if something like this just “clicks” better for you, but, jeez. Most of the time I just needed to put in a simple operation or make a simple graph or whatever. Too many steps to do just simple things.
But it worked great.
It is what it is I guess. Now they can go back on the shelf until I get rid of them or my kids do when they have to clean up my “collection” lol.