Wednesday, August 10, 2005

My calculator is back!


Here's my baby (HP32SII), all fixed and clean. I hadn't heard anything from fixthatcalc.com for ages but finally they came through after 6 weeks or so. I thought they hocked it on eBay or something! Randy turned out to be really nice. Notice the "hello" symbol doesn't really work with the pixelated number display.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

I can see having "love" for an old friend....even an Calculator....but I guess this is where we split ways. :-)

I mean there are MAC and PC computer people today ...well, there were HP and "EVERYONE ELSE" calculator people back then. (maybe still)

I was one of those people who never really appreciated Reverse Polish Notation...yea, it's more natural for a stack based computer....yea, it saves you one keystroke in this massive 30 keystroke calculation.....but I could give my "normal" non-RPN calculator to my mother and she was able to add up her grocery bill.

Give her an HP and she would probably be throwing it away and apologizing to me that she had broken it. (I am of course trying to make a joke about the HP vs everyone else....but I'm not sure my "Mother uses and HP" story would be that far from fact :-)

Ok....but I don't have the same love of a HP calculator...but I too have my own "old-friend". I have two of my fathers old slide rules from god knows when...when he was in school and his first engineering job at Locheed I guess (He had a degree in physics and was a Mechanical Engineer for a while)

I still have those two slide rules tucked away in a safe place in the basement....but I haven't had the refurbished....they sit there in all their aged, used and worn condition.

But, even though I like having these, I am also sort of sad because my father had originally taught me to do a number of different kinds of calculations on their many different scales. But now, I sit and am only able to to simple multiplication and division on them. (I don't think that loss of slide rule knowledge will slow my Engineering growth, but I will miss that little connection with my father...that little bit he taught me about that slide rule.)

I hope some of the other lessons my mom and dad taught me are not so easily lost. (wow....how does my mind work....from a story about an old friend (HP Calculator) that segways to thoughts of my parent....strange...no??? :-)