Tuesday, May 4, 2021

The joy of finding an app for simulating my vintage scientific pocket calculator

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the April 28th meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters club the theme was Love Those Gadgets! I’m a retired engineer so calculators are one of my favorite gadgets. On March 27, 2021 I blogged about The joy of changing to an iPhone. I was not impressed when I looked at the very basic calculator app supplied under the Utilities icon. At the App Store I was pleasantly surprised to find that for $10 I could purchase the RLM-11CX. It simulates an old friend, my vintage HP-11C scientific pocket calculator (shown above). Having that app means one less thing to carry on trips.

 

The HP-11C scientific calculator was manufactured between 1981 and 1989, so mine might be almost four decades old. It has a liquid crystal display (LCD) rather than the red light emitting diodes used previously on my HP-45 and HP-97. Those calculators used rechargeable batteries and came with a jack for plugging in an AC adapter. The HP-11C calculator uses three A76 or 357 button batteries which typically last me for over two years. It has no AC adapter. The 11C is in the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series, which also includes the HP-12C financial calculator that also was introduced in 1981 and is still available as an updated version – the HP12C Platinum. 

 

 

  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father was a chemical engineer who always had a calculator at home. I grew up using his mechanical Marchant and electronic HP9100A, which I mentioned in a March 27, 2012 blog post titled Do words keep their original definitions? But the very first calculating device I owned was analog rather than digital. For my tenth-grade chemistry class I learned to use a 10” Pickett Simplex aluminum slide rule (shown above), which I mentioned in a November 25, 2020 blog post titled A million times too large.

 


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