On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 7:10 AM, Neil Cherry via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 11/07/2017 10:40 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 11/07/2017 09:36 PM, Glenn Roberts via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Ah a fellow RPI'er! I was one of the minions lugging my Keuffel & Esser
up and down the hills of Troy, but lo and behold a piece of pocket-sized engineering beauty began to appear on campus (among those lucky, or rich enough) - the HP-35 "slide rule" pocket calculator! It would be a few calculator generations later that I could afford one (the HP-21) but I was hooked for life on HP and RPN! Nothin like em!
Right there with you on that. I use an HP-48GX at my desk, an HP-41CV on
the RF bench, and an HP-49G in the calibration lab.
I'm running Droid48 on my Android Phone.
Still have my HP21C (I think it's a C might be an S, with the broken door).
This subject of RPN, Slide Rule, Algebra, calculators never gets old for me. I've used Slide Rulers in the past, and the RPN calcs too. But my background was first in mathematics and physics before transitioning to engineering. The view of the how the role of RPN calculations and traditional mathematics coexisted was interesting. My classes involved algebra,trig,and calculus taking precedence. If you noticed the equations are never written in RPN. But RPN is easily used for computations, as on a Slide Rule - except there aren't any function keys :) You can say that RPN is more of a Low-Level [microcode] form of computing, where the actual steps can be correlated 1-1 to the actions of the ALU inside the CPU. Whereas the traditional mathematics is a form of High-Level programming language, the firmware in your computer is capable of translating the algebraic expressions to perform the RPN functions in the background. Dan