I'll once again rewind back to 1985 when I was working at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California and explain myself a little as to why I am having quite an obsession at the moment with Hewlett Packard.
I bought this off a Canadian seller a week or so ago, and it arrived yesterday and made me happy, as you can see, it is not for the HP-12C it is in fact for the HP-11C Scientific calculator. Including shipping this little gem cost me C$27 and it is worth every penny in my opinion.
It has the feel of a piece of history and it transports me back in time to the moment I did not buy one.
If you use algebraic calculators using infix notation, schemes such as AESH, AESP or the combination system of AOS then more than likely you will, at some point in your career, be shown how inefficient it can be when compared with postfix notation, specifically RPN or reverse Polish notation.
In the engineering building at McDonnell Douglas there seemed to be a fair few engineers with an HP calculator and the "new kids on the block" at that time were the HP-11C and the higher end HP-15C both of which were Voyager revision RPN calculators.
In 1985 the HP-11C was US$75 and the HP-15C was US$120 which was a lot of money and even though most of my peers in the office were running RPN calculators, I decided to stick with infix and ended up buying a TI-66 AESP calculator which had a lot more program steps that the HP-11C and was a little cheaper.
In 1986, my car was stolen in the UK, and that was the last I saw of the TI-66
I have ordered an HP-11C from eBay, it should arrive in a few weeks, we will review that when it arrives, in the mean time I will hold my spiral bound manual and take a peek to see what I will be attempting when it arrives.
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