HP-42s - The love of my life

June 19, 2014

At 19yrs of age, boys fall in love with the love of their life. So did I, I bought my first and only calculator, an HP-42S. It has been loyal to me ever since. It helped me through my engineering classes. It helped me through my first years working as an engineer. Let me tell you about it.

Still...

For the record, 3 years later, I also met my wife. She is the love of my eternity, i.e. a class higher than semiconductor powered calculation devices. Still, this rant is not about her, so let’s focus on the bit-crunching of the Saturn-processor.

Competition

I admit, the competition was fierce: Mathcad, mathematica, maple, matlab, R, even Microsoft Excel... they all tried very hard to make old-style calculators obsolete. In a way, they succeeded. Who’s still using a calculator in a common science or engineering job? Very few of us do.

Disaster

And then disaster struck: moving from our first apartment to another, my calculator got lost. I admit, I wasn’t even aware of the loss at that time. I had become a full-time maple/excel/Perl/C++ user by then.

I rediscovered the need for a calculator when re-entering the world of academia in 2006. After searching for a few days in my personal stuff (still unpacked after moving), the conclusion was unavoidable: I lost my precious HP-42s. Remembering my love for RPN (reverse polish notation), the route was evident: surf the net for the latest HP calculator. A few weeks later, as HP50G was delivered to my home.

An apology for a calculator

Then, how come I described the HP-42s above as my only calculator? Forgive me the bold language, but... the HP50G...it sucks. Simple operations require way too many key strokes. And that is a real show stopper. The reason for that is simple: I don’t use a calculator for complex calculations, for that I use my PC/Workstation. I use it for simple quick and dirty calculations. There, every key stroke counts. In addition the HP50G has way too many features (same reason: I don’t use a calculator for complex calculations), the simplicity of the HP-original calculators got lost when HP sold it’s calculator business to a third party still using HP’s name. Therefore, I don’t consider the HP50G to be my calculator. It does not deserve that name. Besides: it is so battery hungry (4 AAA batteries every 3 months) that even the running costs become a problem. For comparison’s sake: I completed my entire engineering studies (6years) with only two sets of batteries for my HP-42S. I put my HP50G in my drawer. I doubt whether I’ll ever use it again.

Happy end

Recently, I stumbled on my old HP-42S again. You won’t be surprised that the only fact of finding it again, still gives me joy today. In the mean time, I also found an excellent software emulation (Free42, by Thomas Okken) that brings the HP-42S experience to my finger tips on my smart phone. The only thing that is missing there, is the perfect-quality keyboard of the original device. Still, I owe Thomas big time, for giving eternal life to the HP-42S and opening this heritage to the world... for free.