For Fans of the old HP RPN Calculators

4-stack memory?! Man, you gotta get with the times! My HP48SX will stack 500 numbers. That's one sweet calculator!*



*That I bought in 1989, and still use every day.
 
Four is actually perfect. It's surprising, but true. I have an RPN calculator program for all my PCs. It allows you to set whatever stack depth you want. I experimented with deeper stacks, but I am back to four.
 
Gollnick said:
Four is actually perfect. It's surprising, but true. I have an RPN calculator program for all my PCs. It allows you to set whatever stack depth you want. I experimented with deeper stacks, but I am back to four.
Click to expand...

Hmm. What kind of work do you use your RPN calculators for? I had an HP32 with a four high stack for my first year of engineering school, and found it very limiting.

Have you used a calculator that allows you to scroll through the entire stack? If you have only one line that you can see at a time, I can see how you wouldn't want too many lines to have to remember.
 
I'm an electrical engineer working in new-product development.

Man had climbed Mt. Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean, he has fired rockets to the moon, split the atom, achieved miracles... all with four-deep stacks... and all without the use of an = key.
 
Now that HP's sold out of the things, the secondary market's up to $180-$200. Sad that I missed out.
 
Gollnick said:
...Man had climbed Mt. Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean, he has fired rockets to the moon, split the atom, achieved miracles... all with four-deep stacks... and all without the use of an = key.
Click to expand...

That may have just been luck, though.
 
wintermute said:
Now that HP's sold out of the things, the secondary market's up to $180-$200. Sad that I missed out.
Click to expand...

Be of good cheer: I'm sure they will have it back in stock, the thing to do is bookmark the HP web page where it's sold and check it every day like I did. Based on the serial numbers, I'm taking a SWAG that HP is maybe at 5,000+ units out of possibly a run of 10,000 calculators.

Now that I've had more time to play with it, I still like my HP32SII for a simple reason: it can calculate the factorial of a number greater than 69, whereas when I purposely did this with the 15C, the display kept blinking until I turned it off. In defense of the product, the manual states that it can only go up to 69!, but to have it seize like that seems odd.
 
Ultraman said:
Be of good cheer: I'm sure they will have it back in stock, the thing to do is bookmark the HP web page where it's sold and check it every day like I did. Based on the serial numbers, I'm taking a SWAG that HP is maybe at 5,000+ units out of possibly a run of 10,000 calculators.

Now that I've had more time to play with it, I still like my HP32SII for a simple reason: it can calculate the factorial of a number greater than 69, whereas when I purposely did this with the 15C, the display kept blinking until I turned it off. In defense of the product, the manual states that it can only go up to 69!, but to have it seize like that seems odd.
Click to expand...

Where are these new runs made?
 
Gollnick said:
I'm an electrical engineer working in new-product development.

Man had climbed Mt. Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean, he has fired rockets to the moon, split the atom, achieved miracles... all with four-deep stacks... and all without the use of an = key.
Click to expand...

I aways found that if I needed more than four, I did a poor job of setting up the problem.
 
Gollnick said:
It was my high school chemistry teacher, George Johnson, who really inspired me. He preached that you must not see a number as just a group of symbols, keystrokes. No. Numbers have meanings. They represent physical things. A weight, for example, represents the material being weighted. And this raises questions such as just how accurate the weight is, what unit of measure is the weight expressed in, etc. In chemistry or physics... or engineering, you must not separate the numbers from these other traits because you're not just doing math with theoretical numbers but are working with physical things.

He taught to always estimate before you calculate. You can catch a lot of errors this way.

He taught us about significant figures.

And he taught us to do "unit math" which is so important when dealing with numbers that represent physical things where you have units of measure.

He did not allow calculators. You either did all your math... and there was alot... by hand or you let him teach you to use a slide rule. His goal here was to expose you to the slide rule but, even more so, the underlying methods that the slide rule teaches.

I learned a lot of chemistry too.

He was one of the greatest... won the Dow Chemical Catalyst Award as best high school chemistry teacher of... as I recall... maybe... 1978.
Click to expand...

Sounds like my high school physics teacher, the nearly-immortal Mr. Stanley.

Sent me off in the direction of a physics doctorate. Eventually, I hit the mark.

I remember him fondly. In fact, I used many of his principles when I was a physics prof myself.
 
I still use a HP12C Platinum edition! Love that case style. I might get me a 15C one just to have.
 
Received this week. Just played around with one a little bit.

Feels a bit lighter, uses 2032 batteries.

Comes in nice Limited Edition box, has single book manual (haven't browsed yet).

Nice thing is it comes with a PC Emulator to load up (and register), so now my laptop will not have an " = " key.. WOOHOO!!

Now, how to get/find (create? riiiight) a USB (or wireless) pad that will allow me to use thumb mothions to enter vs a standard mouse...
 
I found a HP 15C app for my iPhone (search: rpn calculator free). The only thing that's kind of weird to me is having it on a touch screen and the buttons are a bit small. I really like the tactile feedback that the actual HP calculators have.

Anybody have any other recommendations for RPN calculators for an iPhone?

Ric
 
Last edited:
I use ReallCalc on my Android, and you can set it up for RPN (which I do). It looks like it's available for iPhone/iPad too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top