Looking For Old H-P Calculators
 

Anyone have any old HP calculators for sale, or know of any?

I'm looking for one of the old desktop models, especially the financial models like the HP-92, but also the HP-97.

The handhelds are pretty easy to find on eBay, I'm not so much looking for those, but something like a HP-25/25C would be interesting.

Anyway, if anyone runs across something like this, let me know. I'm not going to collect them, I'm going to use them. Thanks.

I'll have to get to my storage unit, and search. My father was a math wiz, and when I packed up his radio room, I found a drawer full of HP calculators.I wish I could remember what they were. I will attempt to get to the unit this weekend. I have WWE loading in on Sunday, for Monday Night Raw, so I'll do my best in getting to storage tomarrow. If not, it will be during the week sometime.

I still use a 12C / with the chic "Gowd" package - had that since the day I started my job.

rjphttp://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1148054845.jpg

They will have to pry my HP 41CV out of my cold dead hands... :>) I still use it every day. What a geek.

Mike

Hmmm.,.,.I know where to come to sell these calculators i have just sitting in boxes.

Let me know, Bill.

When I was in high school and college (late 1970s) I couldn't afford the top HPs, so I had TIs. >10 years later I rediscovered HPs and got hooked on RPN. Now I can hardly use an algebraic calculator, well I can but am slow and make lots of mistakes.

Haven't had many different models - HP48G (gave to my dad), HP25C (until it stopped working), HP11C, and something like 5 HP12Cs - in office, in briefcase, at home, in car, a couple spares. Also had a HP200LX, that was the best handheld EVER.

I also install a couple HP calculator simulators on every computer I use.

I'm still using an HP32S rpn that I got Dec 1989. I love that thing.

mmm, reverse polish

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.

Yep, math is cool. I've got a Pickett slide rule (very basic) and 6 or 7 Japanese abacii.

Weirdly enough the earliest known abacus is actually Roman, and the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and Roman versions are all a little different.

I still carry and use my 11C

The 11C - the best scientific calculator ever made. Still use my 20+ year old 11C daily, as well. Used a 97C in the early 80's - probably threw it in the trash about the time I bought a PC.

Never cared as much for the 12C.

My 17BII from 10+ years ago commutes between office/clients/home and is used constantly but the 10B I bought in 1989 is never too far away.

(Possibly a Short-sighted comment) - Due to my business and personal habits I can not imagine a device that will replace my HP's.

Timely post. I was just at the HP website earlier this week looking for a replacement for my HP 11C, which I bought new in 1987. About five years or so later, my Pop gave me a spare 11C that he had lying around at work. I have one at work, and one at home, but the work one is on it's last legs (machine shop environment has taken its toll.)

Seems they don't make any of the horizontal layout scientific calculators any more, but they still make the financial version. As an engineer, this doesn't help me much. I checked ebay, and they seem to be going for $3-400. Sorry, but $3-400 buys a lot of Porsche goodies.

So, I'm still on the hunt. (I'm too stupid to use a standard calculator)

An interesting web page if you're a dork like me ;)

http://www.vcalc.net/hp.htm

The new school...
 

Cheaper than HP, and much easier to use

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1148094491.jpg

Wonderful machine. I use this when I'm out in the field...

Would it be weird to tell you I pack two in my desk and one in the glovebox?

http://www.calculated.com/default.asp

rjp

Uh OH!!!!!
 

How much is my H-P 45 with the hard leather case worth. I think I paid $400 for it in 1973.

Where can I get one of those 3 ni-cad battery packs?

11Cs are very common on eBay. They go from from $100 to $150, in used but working condition. More if they come with the solutions books or are in minty condition.

I've had a 12C since the mid 80's and it still works fine.

I have some older (70's or early 80's) HP's and TI's in the garage.

IIRC my first "programming" was on a TI-59 with magstrip memory around 1977. It was a primitive macro assembler. I was 11. My dad is a math + computer geek and even had the thermal printer add-on for the calculator.

Got two HP-45's and a HP-16 (yes I know pure geek stuff) still in working condition.

None for sale of course

Wasnt there some guy claiming to be a time traveller looking for these things?

We must be related then, because in 1977 I was almost the same age (14) and had a TI-59, my dad was a mathematician, and he had a matching TI-59 with the printer. Funny.

Which old HPs and TIs do you have?

TI-89 has been and will be my tool of choice for some time, unless I am at the computer and can use Mathematica or Maple. Both are such powerful tools and can reduce human computation by a huge margin.

Transport yourself back in time 33 years.

When I got my HP45 I sold my yellow aluminum slide rule for half what I paid for it 6 months prior, my friends thought I was crazy. (I still have the ivory one from the 40's.) The advantage to using these to study engineering was huge.

My adviser said if he could smuggle one back into his native Poland it would have been worth a car.

These were a much bigger deal than a pansy ass calculator that was marketed by TI giving them to high school math teachers.

I just remembered, my Dad had one of the earliest portable ("near pocket sized") calcs in around 72/73? I think it was made by Bowmar and was super spendy, like $300-400, but we're really pushing the memory recall now. I might actually have it here somewhere.

I got my HP 11C (scientific) and 16C (programming) back in the 80's some time. Still using them....
-Chris

They were called the "Bowmar Brains". I remember the ads in the mid-70s, when I was in high school. I think they did just basic arithmetic.

In 76 I had a pocket Rockwell. I discovered that if I typed in a number and hit the division key then the mutiplication key it gave the square root of that number. Pretty cool because that calc did not have that function! I nevr new if it was designed to do that our if it did it by happenstance?

Also remember spelling words with it as well...

or better yet, just using basic arithmatic, how do you calculate the square root of any number to 4 places? We had to learn it in 7th grade but with pocket calcs I have soon forgot. Does anyone remember? It wasn't through approximations either, the teacher showed us a series of instructions - mostly plug-n-chug but it worked like a deadass charm.

I do it in the car, while driving, and I don't have access to a calculator.

Hey, remember when we were kids, before they taught us decimals, and we got to throw away the remainder? Yeah, those were the days...

I have my 15C from college and still use it alot. Not much mention of the 15C. I guess it wasn't very popular.

Never one to waste anything, I saved my long division remainders from gradeschool. I wish I hadn't tossed them out when I got older. I bet I could have got some cash if I'd put them on eBay. ;)
-Chris

Yeah, I do it to figure out my gas mileage. The rest of the time, its reach for the calculator or do a approximation (I just divide num and denom by whatever works until they're reduced to a manageable fraction). If I knew, as a kid, that as an adults only use long division during the 2 minutes after leaving a gas station, I'd probably have been less studious.

I don't think that I am as high speed, low drag as you guys are, but every year on the Navy Fire Controlman advancement exams I keep re teaching my troops how to convert base 10 to binary, octal and hex. The new squids just aren't getting the same quality instruction I did. They changed the curriculum, and now they don't seem to retain any basic digital, AC or solid state theory.
We are allowed to use calculators, but it doesn't seem to help if they don't understand the why.

Micah

I believe that is the TI-83 that is often used in highschool, at least in this area. I understand how big a deal these old calculators were at the time. A TI-89 has a computer algebra system, unlike the other lower number TI's, which is why it is so powerful.

Red-beard: those remainders become important when doing modular arithmetic.

That wasn't the point. If you were using a slide rule to calculate lets say, the thickness of a beam to support a certain weight, the slide rule says, "10". You needed to know enough about the underlying concept (not just blindly typing numbers into a calculator looking at a printed formula) to realize by orders of magnitude, this meant 10 feet, not 10 inches.

Remember the issue with that Mars Orbiter because one engineering team (Lockheed I beleive) used English units while the NASA team used metric? The calculator/computer enables more blind reliance on the answer because you don't need to validate orders of magnitude as you did with the slide rule.

Square roots with basic arithmetic?

Here's how you do it with an Abacus. Doesn't get much more basic than that. Just a way to do the arithmetic without writing the numbers down

http://www.gis.net/~daveber/Abacus/SquareRoot.html

If you don't want to root through that link, here's a link with about 10-15 different methods

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_roots

Wikipedia is an amazing resource.

I bought one of these around 1981. The Sharp PC-1211 - the first pocket computer. It was AWESOME. At the time, we didn't have PC's in engineering school - still using friggin' punch cards and Fortran!

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_pc1211_tandy_trs80_pc1.html

I just ran to the garage and grabbed my dad's old HP 12C. I have an HP 10B financial calculator that I used to take with me when new car shopping for quick calcultions to see where the dealer was trying to screw me... Now that I have a PDA with Excel, I don't use it so much.

Speaking of punch cards, does this bring back nightmares for anyone else?! :D

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1148234819.gif