[COFF] [TUHS] Re: forth on early unix

[Dan Cross via COFF]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM Larry McVoy via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 10:40:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall via COFF wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Sep 2025, Larry McVoy via COFF wrote:
> >
> > > I say this as a guy who loved the reverse polish HP calculators, but my,
> > > oh my, that reads as gibberish to me today.  Probably because I have an
> > > old tired boomer brain.
> >
> > I still treasure my olde HP-42S.
>
> I still remember going to a store where they sold an HP-16c, the sales
> guy hurled it at the wall of the store.  Like as hard as he could.
> And it worked and it did hex and octal and binary, yeah, bought that.
>
> These days I can find an app that does that online when I want the memories.
> It's not the same as touching those keys, the sales guy told me the print
> on the keys is not on top, it goes all the way through the keys so they
> never wear out.
>
> Those were the days, my friend, wwe thought they'd never end, but then we
> out sourced and things went down hill.  I don't know where you buy stuff
> like what the old HP did.

My dad had the HP-15c, which I always thought was super cool.  But he
is (was; he's retired now) a real engineer, unlike me, who is just a
poser.  I believe he still has it; I remember being fascinated by all
the cool symbols on it when I was a kid.

That said, this fellow over in Switzerland has done an amazing job
building recreations of a number of the classic HP calculators,
including the 15C and 16C.  https://www.swissmicros.com/products

I still keep an RPN calculator on my desk, though I rarely need to use
it anymore; most of the time if I need to do a quick computation, I
just fire up `bc` at the command line.

        - Dan C.