Alternative accuracy testing

popper

Well-Known Member
RPN - HP nomenclature for a stack machine. Like the LSI 11, 6502, etc. A,B & operator in C. pop the stack and C says what to do. Without i & j, most stuff wouldn't work. Intel develped the 2002 from the TI hand unit but did produce the 4004.
 

alamogunr

Member
I was reading thru this thread and only marginally interested until it got into a discussion of RPN and HP calculators. I was a lowly Industrial Engineer most of my career. I lucked into my first HP quite awhile ago, maybe35+ years. I now have 2 that work, a HP12C financial and a HP32SII. I also have a HP42S that has quit working. I sure wish I could find someone that could fix it. I freely admit that I don't know how to use most of the functionality of the two scientific models but the HP12C has been very useful. I acquired the HP42 from a QA person when I was working. The company had purchased it for him without knowing what he was expected to do with it so he sold it to me for $15. I've been retired for almost 13 years so that had to have been about 15 years ago.

I ran across a website of a person that advertised that he repaired HP calculators. I both tried to phone and email him but got no response. At first I thought that maybe he had died and the site hadn't expired yet, but about a month ago I went to the site to see if it was still there and found a statement that the site had been updated on February 19, 2019. No response now either to phone or email.

I am reading the article on using DOE to work up a load. Not that I will got to that extreme, but it is interesting and maybe some aspects may be useful to me but then again, it may not be useful if you don't follow all the way.

Sorry for being so long winded but I don't know how to stop typing.
 
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Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Still have my HP 16C I got while in college. Got it for a Christmas in 84 I believe. Wife hates it, RPN is not her ball of wax. I used to be good with it but today would struggle to do more complex equations.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Basic number-crunching to solve anything (even simple derivatives) will never be obsolete as far as I can tell, and nothing does it faster or more sensibly than a RPN calculator. I bought two of the 32S II units in high school (put one up as a spare) and one finally died a few years ago. The other one lives in the top drawer of my Matco toolbox....in the garage.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
I had a 32S.

don't y'all be getting mad now.
but I used it as a converter for my old Coleco football game so I didn't have to keep buying battery's.
the calculator still worked and I used it as my cover story for the game, but eventually it got confiscated when it's secondary nature was found out.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
32S II in HS......geez. I was a senior engineer for a couple of decades then. Making
me feel old, Ian.

Don't ever run down slide rules. We got to the moon with slide rules. At that point computers were
just silly, limited toys, pretty much, unless they took up a few rooms. Slide rules were it until about
for portable computation 1973 when the HP35 came out, quickly followed by the HP45. My parents got
me the HP45 for a college graduation present, and it cost over $400, and for comparison, a new VW Bug was
$1999. So, 20% the cost of a low priced car, perhaps $4000 in today's money.

I took my first computer programming course in 1967 when I was in HS. We had a very forward thinking
algebra and trig teacher in the rural town in central Fla, and he arranged for a school bus to take
students interested over to the Univ of Fla on Wed nights after school to take a course in computer
programming. We had a blast, and my future bride, then just a girl I knew in class, went too, because her Dad
ran the computer at the university.
It wasn't until '69 that I went to the university full time, and took the real course, which was much
easier, of course, after having already done it once. I was on the cusp of computer development
my whole career, starting in HS.
If somebody could fix the intermittent zero key on my HP45, it would still work, at least the last I checked, about
15 years back.

Bill
 
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