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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