The totally off-topic thread

[OATEK]

Just now ... View attachment 57263

I watched this land and pull up at gate E4.

 

[anat0l]

Purchased an hp25c back in 1977 - $183 - clearly recollect as it was almost all of my summer holiday employment savings.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/25c.jpg

It's interesting to hear that people are commenting about buying their first calculator and it being really expensive.

Now I don't know how much kids these days get for being a shop assistant at Target or flipping burgers at McDonalds (no prejudice against such people, just off hand examples), but I imagine it wouldn't take them terribly long to raise enough to buy a school-board approved calculator for their studies. Probably not an entire summer. These days, kids might just save up that kind of money to buy an iPad or the like.

So why buy one? Was it necessary? Was it so much better than traditional tools at the time that it was worth buying it?

Even when you got one, was it so much better than the methods you were used to, i.e. did you say, "where have you been all my life"?

 

[serfty]

I was commencing an applied physics course at RMIT. I believed it would be useful.

The calculator was programmable .. up to 50 steps ... with that as an 18yo, I found I could "make it dance".

It was that year I found my calling an soon after switched to computer science.

 

[JohnK]

So you live an apartment and at 11:00pm you start to play loud music. Yep. What sort of mentality do you need to behave this way? Animals would be asleep by now. Saturday night means nothing people need to get up early every day of the week.

Email off to agent. If same tenants as before then they will be out. If new tenants they get their first and final warning.

 

[JohnM]

Purchased an hp25c back in 1977 - $183 - clearly recollect as it was almost all of my summer holiday employment savings.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/25c.jpg

I bought one of those at work! Cool little calculator.

 

[kelvedon]

In my first year (applied optics) exams we had to use 4 figure log tables, second year they relented to use of non programmable calculators.

 

[rainbowgirl]

I got a solar scientific calculator, early in secondary school in the early 1980s. My parents could see that I'd be doing Maths up until Year 12 so they thought it was a worthwhile investment. By the time I got to Year 11, log books were still on the compulsory booklist. It felt strange having these books when the calculator could do the same thing. Sometimes it was quicker by calculator, other times it was quicker using the book. The key was to figure out which one would work quickest in the circumstances. I believe both were allowed during the exams.

 

[TomVexille]

By the time I went to high school we could play Doom on our calculators

 

[TheRealTMA]

I got a solar scientific calculator, early in secondary school in the early 1980s. My parents could see that I'd be doing Maths up until Year 12 so they thought it was a worthwhile investment. By the time I got to Year 11, log books were still on the compulsory booklist. It felt strange having these books when the calculator could do the same thing. Sometimes it was quicker by calculator, other times it was quicker using the book. The key was to figure out which one would work quickest in the circumstances. I believe both were allowed during the exams.

The problem then became that when a student calculated the PH of a solution, and the calculator said 189.6, they thought this must be correct. Never happened with a slide rule.

Well I remember lobbying and the first HP35 we bought in our lab was 'so' expensive (relatively) that we had a special cradle to securely lock it to a bench. Oh how I loved when we upgraded to the wonderful card programmable TI model... Then I discovered the Data General NOVA 1200 in the crystallography lab... Heavan! Could generate random bridge hands, sort student class names and even play Star Trek after loading the game for 30 mins from paper tape.

 

[serfty]

Purchased an hp25c back in 1977 - $183 - clearly recollect as it was almost all of my summer holiday employment savings. ...

To put that purchase price into perspective, cases of beer could be had for $10 back then ...

...
So why buy one? Was it necessary? Was it so much better than the tools at the time that it was worth buying it?

Even when you got one, was it so much better than the methods you were used to, i.e. did you say, "where have you been all my life"?

Certainly not necessary, but more efficient - they replaced slide rules and their inherant inaccuracy (significant digits at the most basic) and were more convenient to use than log tables.

So yes, much better than the methods existing ...

...

Well I remember lobbying and the first HP35 we bought in our lab was 'so' expensive (relatively) that we had a special cradle to securely lock it to a bench. Oh how I loved when we upgraded to the wonderful card programmable TI model...

The "holy grail" at the time for mine was the HP65 with magnetic strip storage.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp65.htm

http://www.hpmuseum.org/65.jpg

 

[anat0l]

The problem then became that when a student calculated the PH of a solution, and the calculator said 189.6, they thought this must be correct. Never happened with a slide rule.

Ah yes, because when using log tables and slide rules, you were always told to estimate in your head for the mental placement of the decimal point.

I'm not sure if kids these days are told to even do some basic mental maths and estimation in order to check against fat finger syndrome. Also, with graphics calculators, the idea of curve sketching and roots estimation methods kind of become redundant.


Calculators certainly made life easier for me in high school when they were finally allowed in exams (no graphics calculators for us, only standard scientific calculators), though the "trade off" was supposedly we were made to do more work in less time.

Then, in uni, they tried to reduce the whole dependency on calculators (or made them fairly redundant) by selecting numbers which solve very neatly - e.g. the sine of a 30 degree angle - or forcing you to answer the whole problem in terms of symbols.


I can't see how graphics calculators would have made our high school or university work any better significantly. It might be a nice distraction, as TomVexille alludes to. I'm not sure how those who went through high school with graphics calculators would feel if they didn't have them.

 

[TheRealTMA]

To put that purchase price into perspective, cases of beer could be had for $10 back then ...

Certainly not necessary, but more efficient - they replaced slide rules and their inherant inaccuracy (significant digits at the most basic) and were more convenient to use than log tables.

So yes, much better than the methods existing ... The "holy grail" at the time for mine was the HP65 with magnetic strip storage.

HP-65

http://www.hpmuseum.org/65.jpg

IIRC. The TI (65?) was the first that had magnetic strip recording on small card strips, and I stored several 'programs' for a zoetrope distillation and reactions for first and 2nd order kinetics on them.

 

[cove]

Beer for $10 a pack and we still tried home brewing.They were the good old days.
Now you can pay $10 for a glass of beer at a restaurant.

 

[serfty]

IIRC. The TI (65?) was the first that had magnetic strip recording on small card strips, and I stored several 'programs' for a zoetrope distillation and reactions for first and 2nd order kinetics on them.

TI's were certainly desirable but my recollection is of being relatively expensive when compared to the HP range. Certainly out of my price range.

I recall there being "camps" - those for TI and those for HP ... a little bit like (but not as voracious as) the camps of appleficionados and the andriodamasios of this day and age. (But different since the TIs & HPs of the 70's basically worked the same way.)

My first calculator was a Sharp Elsi-mate with a 3 digit display and 8 significant digits. It would show numbers up to three characters at a time.

e.g. -2345 would show as "-2," then ",345."; +98765.43 as "+9" then "8,76" & "5.43".

 

[Bundy Bear]

At work I use a 20 year old calculator its set up so that you put the + or the - sign after the number, one reason I still use it is that is has a good size number display.
Every so often I do use the iPhone calculator as I generally have the phone on me all the time.

 

[JohnK]

Went to Tamborine Mountain yesterday. On the way back drove through Logan Village and Logan. What an eye opener especially shopping at Logan Village Woolworths.

To top off the weekend on my way to Caboolture on the train. About to move to another carriage as I have just about had enough of the person sitting across from me.

 

[Julesmac]

If you care too much, then yes you will often struggle. I don't find it too hard (think of themes, look around, think of what they've told you in the past), but it's more the fact I dislike celebrations etc that makes it more challenging at times.

anat01 my go-to present is a magazine subscription (I think I use mags online) but there are a number of sites. Benefits - the gift arrives every month so you get 12 month's worth of praise! Very easy and quick to do online, and cheaper than the cover price, generally. You can test this by going through the online site or direct to the magazine publisher. Pretty wide choice of titles too

 

[coriander]

And the most bizarre flight path. Surely not a test flight. Any clues?

Gotta love that the flight path contains the outline of the AFL Premiership Cup.

 

[anat0l]

Gotta love that the flight path contains the outline of the AFL Premiership Cup.

Well, they very well couldn't have traced out a cough, which seemingly was commonplace in other parts of the world.

 

[JohnK]

My Samsung S3 screen is not white anymore. But have a new issue now. Believe it's a virus and related to the previous symptom.

Gmail has been extremely slow to refresh the past 2 days and this morning while browsing AFF a black window about 1cm square appears randomly throughout the screen. Sometimes the window is not black but contains part of the screen text inside the window.

Not good.