Back in my day....

.... when I was a uni student studying engineering in 1992, my best friend from high school showed me his new HP48 scientific graphing calculator. These were the flagship models of the HP calculator line and they were ridiculously expensive. I can't remember the exact figures, but I think they were almost a thousand dollars expensive... However, he reasoned, they were the types of tools that engineers used and it made sense to learn how to use them  as a student. It made sense to me at the time and I mentioned it to my parents who bought me one for christmas and my birthday one year. Woohoo!


As it turns out, the university I went to was very theoretical and we learnt all things from first principles and so I didn't really need most of the functions of the calculator. I also discovered that I really sucked at a lot of the first principles of electronics engineering (although I did really well at the digital stuff and I liked the applied side) and I ended up focusing on software engineering which became my career for many years after I left uni. My friend also ended up in the IT industry and quickly found his way into (shock, horror)... management...  I don't know what ever happened to his calculator and I doubt he got value from it. I almost got into trouble in one exam because it was too advanced and they were almost going to confiscate it from me. It was a cryptography exam and some heavy duty number crunching was required and I fortunately managed to show them how to do a hard reset on the calculator to prove that I hadn't stored anything in there in an attempt to cheat.


Twenty years later and I'm doing statistics in psychology. I enjoyed statistics when I did it in engineering, mainly because I understood it and found it easy, especially compared to things like electromagnetic theory and quantum physics... I've just moved house and all my things are in boxes and I have no idea where my calculator is. My iPhone has a rather nice and satisfactory scientific calculator but it isn't allowed in exams. I thought I'd go have a look and see how much calculators go for nowadays, totally expecting them to be only available as oddities in specialist stores; much like a slide rule might be. I discover that something that cost me $70 in high school would now be worth about $15. Actually, my high school calculator wouldn't have been too bad if all the print on the buttons hadn't been worn off due to so much use.. Yes, I used it that much... I'm a nerd... 


Suddenly, I see advertised an HP48gII which was one of the successors to my calculator from uni. It was selling for a princely sum of $200 which is more than any other calculator on that site but lot less than what mine cost. I don't know what I expected really and this whole trip down memory lane suddenly made me feel so old.


I mean, back in my day, I used to go to the milk bar and buy chocolate drops for one cent each and I used to love the dixie cup ice creams for twenty cents!!!