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Calculator blog


Musings and comments about our common interest

 

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RPN calculator for Macs

It may be old story for many of you, but it still news for me. 

 

I have just made the move to Apple computers. I used apple for a brief stint in 1986 during university, then another one for a couple of years in 1995 (when my company's policies were not so much enforced, and I was able to get them to let me use a Mac), and then a number of years in the shadows until I decided that this company deserved a good dedicated machine.

 

It seems to me that Apple is this century's equivalent to what HP was in the eighties. The best available quality, people behind it willing to walk the extra mile to get the product right, fantastic design, etc. I find it surprising that there are so many of us (and by us I mean the people around the HP museum and HP calculators at large) deride Apple ethos and their products. Yes, it is true that Apple products are more design-oriented that HP's ever were; but there is the same attention to user friendliness, to have a seamless user experience, to get a "round" product; save for the time difference, the HP15c would have been an excellent Apple product.

 

Why this rant now?

 

As soon as I got my hands on the mac, I started to try to load calculator emulator software for HP machines, but I found that some of them were buggy (x41c for Mac, alpha version), some other were just for PowerPC processor machines, and I ended up using free42 for the time being.

 

I want to find a version of HP41 that works on my Lion OS machine, and an HP15c version as well (I need to install some of the usual suspects - I just dod not have the time yet)

 

But for the sake of exploring the machine, I opened the enclosed "calculator" application. When looking through the menus, I found that it had a programmer version, a scientific one, and an RPN mode for all of them! It even has an option for speech: you can set it to tell you the result, or any button you press. It is a well thought out utility - worthy of the HP ethos.

 

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