The segue trigger – fellow coming in to do his taxes with a moving stipend.
We lost the ability to deduct moving expenses back in 2017 when they made taxes “simpler”.
And dropped me back to my move here ages and ages ago (1979). The company paid for a mover, and I’m pretty sure they stole my programmable scientific calculator. You whippersnappers will have no idea what that was, but it was a pretty big deal then.
Was it an HP? I’m a whippersnapper and I do love some old RPN calculators with the good keys and simple interfaces.
I believe it was. That was the company that made them for TI and then branched out on their own? Mom and I price-shopped.
They’re still my thought for “technology prices dropping fast”. We bought the first one for around $200 in 1974. After I foolishly left it under my desk for maybe 15 minutes, the 2nd one only cost around $125 and was programmable.
That’s why you should always have an automatic locator/noise maker installed on them!!
Nope, TI, Casio, and HP were all competitors back in the day in that space. HP was the “good one”, TI was well liked if you didn’t want to use RPN.
If you don’t remember typing in things like 2 ENTER 2 + to get 4 then you probably had a TI 
All of you guys are whippersnappers…LOL I haven’t thought of Reverse Polish Notation in years. But I have you all beat. Before I plunked down my hard earned paper route money on my first HP Scienticic Calculator with RPN, I had a Bowmar Brain…anyone?
I had a fancy slide rule that I recently traded away if you want to go really old school grandpa.
That’s funny… I used to use my slide rule to make sure the calculator was correct…Ahhhh the good old days that predated my 300 baud modem…and my CompuServe account and the Wildcat Bulletin Board that I used to run…LMAO
You guys remember Circuit City? And Radio Shack back when it had electronic components?
Lol. I remember that. I used to get components from them. It wasn’t that long ago.
I’d even get their catalog.
Yes, but how many of you were a members of the battery of the month club and carried the punch card in your wallet?
Or owned both a TRS-80 and TRS-100. Desktop and laptop…LOL I even had my own acoustic coupler for that speedy 300 baud modem.
or a Timex Sinclair 1000
I also was the SYSOP (System Operator) of a Wildcat BBS (Bulletin Board System) named The RailNet. It kept all 22 Model Railroad Clubs in the Dallas/Fort Worth area interconnected. I operated it out of my house for many years. Yes, those were the days.
I was one of the builders/operators of the Christmas Model Railroad Display, known now as the Trains at Northpark. Back then it was a permanent O gauge train layout at the Galleria Mall.
Anybody remember the controversy over whether a calculator was allowed during exams?
History of RadioShack
https://museumofmagneticsoundrecording.org/ManufacturersRadioShackRealistic.html
The caption on this page is precious.
though a wee bit dated (before the final demise of Fry’s.)
My freshman year in college (1972), some classes allowed them in labs not during exams, you could use a slide rule. (Of course unless you had a five foot long slide rule you couldn’t get enough significant digits to be accurate enough for an answer so you had to do it long hand).
Engineering and Pre-med students all had HP calculators that cost about $300 ($1,919 in 2021 dollars). My first semester of tuition and fees at Cal. St. Uni., Long Beach was $78 for 18 units ($500 in 2021 dollars, my books cost more). By the fall of 1974 prices for a 5 basic functions (= + - * / SQRT calculators were down to about $100 and NEC came out with a bunch of calculators that specialized in financial, statistical, math (mainly trig) functions with some memory plus little 3" magnetic strips you could program (I got the statistical one one because they were allowed in exams by spring of 1974).
The one that I recall broke the price barrier open was Litronix with M- & M- memory and their warranty against breakage - the TV ad had a car run over one crushing it and getting replaced.
[Advertisement], Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1974, p. N9. Litronix 2260R, regularly priced at $89.95, on sale for $68.88.
Calculators ate batteries big time and the Litronix would get warm.
My first IBM PC clone in 1986 4.33 MHz, 640K RAM, 40MB (that’s FORTY Megs which means in had a partition becuase it exceeded 32MB) was $2,800 ($6,719 in today’s dollars). But for those dollars I did get a VGA monitor and a modem card that was the max speed allowed by the FCC.
A little bit of history…
The very first handheld calculator was co-invented by Jerry Merryman at Texas Instruments in 1967, the other co-inventor was Jack Kilby. Jerry Merryman designed the calculator in 3 days and it took 2 years to build, not bad for a guy without a college degree. Interestingly enough, that handheld calculator did not have a digital display as it printed out the answer on a paper tape.
Several months ago @urbite and I were invited to see Jerry Merryman’s personal lab at his home in Dallas. His widow, Phyllis, allowed us to see his collection of that first handheld calculator plus a very large room full of his high-tech toys. I was honored to purchase some old vacuum tube radios that he had in his lab. As a retiree of Texas Instruments it was a great trip and great memories.
Did you use a cassette player to store your programs? I remember having to store programs several times to get a reliable copy.
I hated the teachers that would let you use a calculator but it did you no good. The tests used variables instead of numbers.
I had to get a specialized HP for an electrical engineering class around 1976 that would calculate with imaginary numbers (i). Something about power distribution.
With HP i got so use to rpn that. If someone handed me a TI I was lost.