Mike RE: best engineers pocket calculator toothless (Mechanical) 4 May 07 16:31 It makes sense to me, but I'm sure there are many opinions on this subject. During the last few years I have moved to Mathematica CalcCenter for almost all my calculations except for simple adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, which I use my TI-30s for. I've been programing in BASIC for twenty years so have never really been interested in programmable calculators. I realize that RPN is a better system but it's not for me. The 88 is much better than the newer 89 according to him, but they aren't cheap and don't fit into a pocket easily. My son has a HP-88 and 89 and these are nice machines. To me it is important that a calculator have the square, square root, inverse and pi as primary functions and not require hitting two keys to get to these functions because of the frequency which they are used. It's a decent calculator with a good feel to the keys. Actually I have 4 or 5 of these spread around in places like the home, office, briefcase, job-site, etc. Now I use the TI-30XA which is a solar powered and costs about $12 to $14 US. I have used the TI calculators for many years and have gotten used to the algebraic entry and the keyboard layout. RE: best engineers pocket calculator prost (Structural) 4 May 07 10:02 One new feature that is nice is that you can switch it from RPN to algebraic, in case someone else who doesn't know RPN wants to use your calculator (which happens often). I finally replaced it with my HP-33s, which is essentially the modern version of the same calculator. It was RPN and had all the mathematical functions you could ever need and some programming, without all the frou-frou crap like graphing, music, etc.
My favorite one was the second one: an HP-32sII. I have been through three scientific calculators in my 21-year career. It not only allows you to work an equation of any complexity quickly and easily, it changes the whole way you think about caluclation and allows you to continue to meddle with your figures as you design. It takes one evening and will change your life if you have been storing numbers, writing them down and using parentheses. If you do anything more than arithmetic (and you probably will), RPN is worth learning.
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