[Don Plumley]

I saved all my dimes and bought a 41C as a HS graduation present for myself. $300 in 1980. As a Freshman in college, I loved figuring out how to program basic chemistry and physics equations into it -- so by the time the midterms/finals came about, I had them all memorized anyway!

I've used an 11C, 12C and now a 17BII (no where near the build quality of the older ones) that I got in business school.

Back in the early 70's, my dad brought home the first TI handheld calculator. Red LEDs so small you needed a magnifying glass to see them. One day it stopped working so I opened it up (nearly gave him a coronary) - hand soldered connections, through hole mounting of resistors and capacitors.

There was an article I read in Scientific American last month that talked about slide rules -- how airplanes and spacecraft were designed with them. The biggest issue (I've never used one) was order of magnitude. You didn't know if the answer was 250.0 25.00 2.500 .2500 etc. So users had to be good at rough approximation to validate their work. This meant they had to have an intuitive understanding of the underlying math, something which is masked by calculators and computers.