Why even bother?

I love well made electronic gadgets and the HP-12C is a very good example of just one. It was conceived and planned at the start of the 1980's and it is still current today, granted by todays standards the processor is a little slow, but the chap Dennis Harms, who led the team designing this calculator, who was told by Mister Hewlett himself to "not fuck it up" mentioned that, in todays age, we dispose of obsolete phones on almost a yearly basis and here is a calculator that has now endured almost forty years of useful life.

You can go to a dollar or a thrift store and buy a scientific calculator for next to nothing nowadays and it is all part of our throwaway society that we have somehow arrived at, stuff is not designed to last nowadays. Therefore, why even bother making that stuff out of quality materials that will endure.

So, the question to myself is "why even bother?" with a vintage calculator that, to most people, has an odd operating system in the form of reverse polish notation, or RPN. It comes down to something very simple and that is I want to continue learning how to do things, and that was true back in the middle of 1994 when I bought my first RPN calculator, the magnificent HP-42S and subsequently I went "all in" by buying the HP-48GX graphic calculator.

The HP-48GX was all I needed for the remaining thirteen years of my engineering career, and it is true that one of the most important aspects of those years was my ability to create programs on that calculator that would make my working life easier.

In retirement, there is little major use for a calculator, so I reason that if I do not bother, then the particular blob of grey matter that I used when I was working will simply erode away, to the point where it won't work, or my own personal version of non-volatile memory will no longer retain variables. It is that reason now, not to make things easier as I get older, but in a way, to present learning challenges to myself to attempt to exercise my brain and stall the inevitable downward spiral.

That's why I bother.