3 ms·

I think I had the Commodore Amiga of that era... The HP 48g. RPN ftw.

allegory 12y ago
Apart from the fact that it was sloooow, impossible to repair as it was glued together, the display was abysmal and you needed to drag the manuals around to be productive. Not a big fan of HP nostalgia to be honest, despite rather liking RPL.
- noonespecial 12y ago
  I dunno about slow. Once I learned its quirks, I became one with the stack, blasting in complex equations in RPN while my peers fiddled with brackets and mode keys. Plus I'll admit to feeling no small amount of nerdy badassery at typing in what looked like alien gibberish to those around me while they slowly WYSIWYGed their way to an answer.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    The UI is incredibly slow to draw. Many users may not have realized that keystrokes were buffered (up to something like 32 key presses) so if you knew your way around the menus and dialogs you could keep typing and the UI would eventually catch up. Unlike when a desktop computer's GUI lags, the 48 series would always behave as though the GUI had drawn instantly, so you could direct input to a dialog box or submenu that wasn't yet visible on screen.
drbawb 12y ago
My trusty 50G got me through High School and parts of College. Programming w/ RPL was something of an enlightening experience. RPN and RPL are what made the concept of 'the stack' finally click for me. RPL was also fantastically simple, too. While other kids were struggling to copy the TI-basic instructions from photocopied sheets: I would quickly have a working program _plus a nifty little GUI._ The equation library and CAS were also incredibly useful when I was given the opportunity to use them. --- The only downside is I couldn't swap any games w/ my classmates. That's OK, though, as I had 3D pinball.
wyclif 12y ago
Back in the day when I was still a land surveyor, the HP48GX was hugely popular in the field among staff surveyors because it was so easy to programmatically extend them or use a COGO card: http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/science/civil/ http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/science/civil/

Apart from the fact that it was sloooow, impossible to repair as it was glued together, the display was abysmal and you needed to drag the manuals around to be productive. Not a big fan of HP nostalgia to be honest, despite rather liking RPL.

noonespecial 12y ago
I dunno about slow. Once I learned its quirks, I became one with the stack, blasting in complex equations in RPN while my peers fiddled with brackets and mode keys. Plus I'll admit to feeling no small amount of nerdy badassery at typing in what looked like alien gibberish to those around me while they slowly WYSIWYGed their way to an answer.
- wtallis 12y ago
  The UI is incredibly slow to draw. Many users may not have realized that keystrokes were buffered (up to something like 32 key presses) so if you knew your way around the menus and dialogs you could keep typing and the UI would eventually catch up. Unlike when a desktop computer's GUI lags, the 48 series would always behave as though the GUI had drawn instantly, so you could direct input to a dialog box or submenu that wasn't yet visible on screen.

drbawb 12y ago

My trusty 50G got me through High School and parts of College. Programming w/ RPL was something of an enlightening experience. RPN and RPL are what made the concept of 'the stack' finally click for me. RPL was also fantastically simple, too. While other kids were struggling to copy the TI-basic instructions from photocopied sheets: I would quickly have a working program _plus a nifty little GUI._ The equation library and CAS were also incredibly useful when I was given the opportunity to use them. --- The only downside is I couldn't swap any games w/ my classmates. That's OK, though, as I had 3D pinball.

wyclif 12y ago

Back in the day when I was still a land surveyor, the HP48GX was hugely popular in the field among staff surveyors because it was so easy to programmatically extend them or use a COGO card: http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/science/civil/ http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/science/civil/