• 10 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2024

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  • dm319OPtoCalculator Community@midwest.socialHP-91
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    1 month ago

    I think I like the buttons and the highly-specialised functionality. At least that’s what I think when people say ‘what’s the point, you have a far more powerful calculator in your pocket already’. Yes, one without buttons.











  • Yes, looks like coated aluminium - not unlike a can but a little thicker and with no sharp edges. I’ve not seen these before but I think they are disposable/recyclable - i.e. a replacement for a plastic cup and far more pleasant to drink from. I took mine home as a souvenir, but I have had to unsquish it today taking it out of hold luggage.












  • dm319OPtoCalculator Community@midwest.socialHP-12c Platinum
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    4 months ago

    I always thought of financial calculators as a sort of gelded single-function function machine and I didn’t really get them. However, that would ignore the vast number of models available from HP, and that their second ever pocket calculator was a financial one. It turns out that solving the time value of money equation is non-trivial, and the work done on that probably paved the way for calculators with a solver.

    The other thing I didn’t appreciate until I had to use it, is that the interface of the 12c - with the 5 buttons in the top left for n, i, pv, pmt and fv is peak user interface. Press once to input data, but a second consecutive press of these buttons will trigger the solve and drop the result into x. It’s perfect, and means you can solve and use all the calculator functions and stack continuously. Most modern methods use a table, which is hard to extract and input information from the calculator.