5 ms·
I don't go this far back but I do have fond memories of the Casio Fx 501P (I think that was the number) that I bought in 1980. I agonised long and hard over the
by billforsternz 9y ago
I don't go this far back but I do have fond memories of the Casio Fx 501P (I think that was the number) that I bought in 1980. I agonised long and hard over the decision whether to go for that or the 502P (128 program steps versus 256 steps) but my poor student status made the decision for me. It was a beautiful thing and much much cheaper than HP or TI competitors. I fondly remember conceiving and implementing my first program, of any kind, on that thing. It was a dominoes game, and the "AI" worked by maximising the standard deviation (spread) of the tile values left in your hand to try and avoid being left without a play. Standard deviation was one of the built in functions. Man that was a lovely little machine.
- sundaysailor 9y ago>Man that was a lovely little machine. Indeed. There even was a little dot matrix printer peripheral by Casio. It printed on silvery rolls of aluminium-coated paper, I think by electrically burning out dots from the coating. I did ASCII plots of function graphs on it. And some love notes to my girlfriend. Fond memories...
- sundaysailor 9y agoAlso I admire the engineers having developed the firmware for these machines in the eighties under God knows what conditions. It was flawless.
- billforsternz 9y agoActually, the seventies :- )
- billforsternz 9y agoFor the record - I did remember the name correctly and it turns out (I should have realised) that these machines are properly remembered on Wikipedia and elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_FX-502P_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_FX-502P_series One small highlight: Power consumption 0.0008W.