I’ve been thinking about which might have more computing power – my LG Smartphone, or the scientific calculator I bought back in the '70’s.
The 2nd SC I bought was programmable – which the Smartphone only is if you count apps. I can access the internet with the SP – but the internet wasn’t a thing in the 70’s.
Thoughts?
The web browser running on your smartphone (running javascript) is more powerful than any pocket calculator from any decade.
Pretty sure any of my first 3 PC’s were much more powerful than my HP48sx, just without all the advanced software built in. But also pretty sure that either my iPhone, or iPad is faster than all of my first 3 PC combined. (8086, 80286, and 80306)
On top of that, you can write any app directly on any SP which will work with no Internet access.
My four-year-old Samsung Galaxy Note 5 has EIGHT concurrent processors which can run laps around any SC, and I won’t even mention my latest Note 9 which is insane.
How about a calculator emulator for your phone …
Wow, very cool, Draco! 
Does it do square roots and logarithms?
yep, and I’d love to show you how in person.
I can do square roots and logs with a pencil!
I dunno about logarithms, but my phone calculator can morph into a pretty impressive-looking sucker with a lot of slide-rule functionality. Not that I would know how to use them. Trigonometry pretty much short-circuited all my math skills permanently.
Screenshots following are 1-regular, 2-premium, and 3-history tape.
My phone is an iPhone 6, but I’ve used a number of different calculator apps along the way, as the square root key saves my bacon for quilt designs rather often. This particular app ha three little doodads on the left side just above the white screen. That was what changed between the types of calculators. On other versions I’ve had, turning the phone sideways (horizontally) made the scientific version come up. Mileage may vary…
Don’t confuse computing power with programmed user interface and features. The HP 48 SX I mentioned above will do computations on complex matrices, which the scientific calc screens above don’t appear to give any features to support. But they don’t really take all that much computing power to do.
Similarly, I’ve ported particle physics simulation code that was written for a Cray to run on a 386. A fairly small model might take overnight to run, but that calculator never had the memory to be able to run that math, and even if it did, it might have taken months to do the same calculations.
2nd through 4th row of the 2nd display – those are your logarithmic functions. I no longer have a use for them, so I don’t go looking for them. 5th row may also be related to logs. I think it’s tangents, but it’s been years…
So I’ve paid roughly 25% of that 1974 cost for something with better abilities… Both brand new, which defeats the computer I bought for about 1/2 the price (it was old).
I use Droid48 on my SmartPhone. It’s an emulator of the HP 48SX I carried on my belt in college.
RPN is STILL better.
After I made the mistake of leaving the first calculator in the cubby under my desk, the 2nd one was programmable. I never bothered to sit down and figure it out, as most things we did weren’t that repetitive.
I had a 48SX in college and wrote a program to solve trusses for my Statics class homework to check my work. Basically you would enter a crapload of coordinates for the pieces and known values and it would solve the system matrices solving a lot of linear equations. That program would run for 10 minutes on even relatively simple structures and it was always quicker to do it by hand. It was nice having it as a sanity check though. Loved that calculator. Sadly it was stolen at some point in college 
Excel has sufficed for most of the practical physics/money/work math problems and data brute-forcing I’ve needed to perform the last ~20 years. It’s no CAS, its precision isn’t enough for some scenarios, and its built-in function set has curious gaps, but it has countless real-world applications.
There are also free mobile versions packed into many a smartphone.
