Now, how many people ya think would have got that p ... Math / Comp. Sci. here, so it was a 15c for me. Best thing about it besides its awesomeness was that no one would borrow it ... "what do you mean, there's no "=" key ?!?!?" uzzled: RPN For the Win !! :beers2:
I got my first HP in 1975 ,the same HP45 ,it was $300 then,what's that in today's dollars RPN is the best most efficient system. The stacking capability is great when used properly. Funny story, my daughter Leanne is also a Civil Engineer, once when she came home from school on a long weekend,she forgot her calculator,she always used TI's, and needed to do some homework. I lent her my HP 45 and sat back to watch. After trying to perform a calculation , she needed to retrieve an answer,and spent a minute or so looking for an = sign. The look on her face was priceless,since she hated asking me for help. After some education on using RPN,she became quite good and actually liked it, but she still wanted her TI and she never left her calculator at school again. By the way,your a tech savant to notice and ID that calculator with only 1 line showing,and what are doing looking on my desk anyway. Gary
Hey ... you put the picture up :bla: I was a mathematics / Computer Sci. double major and I needed a good calc and everyone had the TI's. HP had just come out with the HP-15c "Scientific with Matrix & Complex Math" when I started a class called Matrix Numerical Analysis 311 and I had a hard time finding one they were so new. Having taken programming classes in Fortran, Pascal, and LISP (anyone remember LISP ?!?!?) I took the the 15c like a duck to water. I wrote programs to utillze and automate alot of the Matrix stuff and when the first test came around I had 7 out of the 8 questions covered using the calculator (really a hand held computer) ... I'd enter the parameters for the specific equations in and hit "Run", sit back and wait for the programmed break points to give me results and write them on the test paper ... then press a few keys, sit back (hands over head :grin and wait for the next round of results to pop up. Teacher is watching but lets me proceed ... It wasn't really cheating because I had to have an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter to program it and get the 15c to do its thing ... ... So about halfway through he walks by and stops looking over my shoulder ... watches my press keys for a bit, then says in a low voice "After class I'd like you to stay for a bit", so when everyone had left he walked over and asked what I had and what i was doing. I spent around the next 2 hours showing him the 15c and then the 400+ lines of code I had written and how they worked for all the problems/equations of the test. He was slightly blown away .. .. the HP-15c became required for that course the next semester and the school store had to stock them
Yep,you're a savant, or as some would say a nerd.:Brow: My first programming experience was with fortran and punch cards.would carry a pack of cards 8" high held together with rubber bands to the computer lab to run the program,woe be any one who dropped those cards. gary
LOL .. we were supposed to use punch cards, but after I made :Brow: friends :Brow: with the female teachers assistant grad. student, she showed me where the new input terminals were and how to store, enter, and run programs from them. There were exactly 9 terminals for the whole college housed at a remote satelite campus where the mainframe was ... befriending her and having a '69 Skylark to get me around meant never having to play punchcard pick-em-up !!. After that first semester the grad. students just thought I was one of them (the nerds). Ohh ... the HP's are kind of collectable. I am good p but not quite that good ... I I.D.'d your 71b here. Took about 2 mins but I knew right off the bat from the bottom row shot in your picture that it was not just a basic calculator - its something Special http://www.hpmuseum.org/
