Thread: Help finding old calculator...

My trusty HP-41CV has died. I'm looking to replace it, and thought maybe someone had one of these laying around in a box at home that's not being used.

I'm looking for a 41C, 41CV or 41CX Hewlett-Packard calculator in working condition. I'm willing to pay up to $100 or whatever you feel is reasonable. Repairs are going to cost $79 + parts minimum with months of waiting.

Thanks in advance!

Seems to me there are 2 types of calculator users. Those who use HP's and everyone else. I once borrowed an HP in school and I never finished the test due to my never taking HP 101
Just a quick search on Ebay revealed this. Looks like you can have 3 of them for $200
Good Luck in your quest!
-Fred

Believe it or not, that's not even for calculators. Those are surveying pac add-ons. They're like memory cards that contain programs specific to surveying.

They come up on eBay, but the bidding war thing gets old, and unless you're willing to bid really high, you have to wait quite a while to get one reasonable. They go for $60-$80 at times, and then they'll all go for $200 for a week or something. Kind of nuts.

This is kind of off topic, but I've been wondering this for a while now- what's so great about HP calculators? I really like my TI 83, but I'm not nearly as die-hard as some of the HP users I've seen.

When I actually used and cared about mathematics in my first lonely year as a lost AE student at Syracuse, I could not be parted from my HP 11C - the clunky size, the reverse Polish notation (not a racist comment, but what it was called those of you with very thin skins) - never knew why is was called Polish anyways, it was just weird, but cool.

Man I could program physics calcs into that thing like a bear - before they got wise to that little trick...not that it helped anyways...

Loved handing that calculator to folks and having them try to use it like a normal calculator - heheh good times...

K

Originally Posted by Quick Orange

This is kind of off topic, but I've been wondering this for a while now- what's so great about HP calculators? I really like my TI 83, but I'm not nearly as die-hard as some of the HP users I've seen.

Most of the HP fanatics are not tied to HP in and of itself, but to the RPN (reverse Polish notation) style of working with numbers on a "stack." It is elegant in its way and is nice when you need to deal with problems in "stages" and keep track of where you're at.

The stack can contain a bunch of working values vs. most algebraic calculators that only know about the current result or whatever you've explicitly stored in memory.

Prior to algebraic calculators including ( ) parentheses keys, complex problems were difficult to solve without doing it in parts and writing down the parts before assembling at the end. RPN solves that by maintaining intermediate values on the stack.

http://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/rpn_or_adl.htm

Originally Posted by Kriton

When I actually used and cared about mathematics in my first lonely year as a lost AE student at Syracuse, I could not be parted from my HP 11C - the clunky size, the reverse Polish notation (not a racist comment, but what it was called those of you with very thin skins) - never knew why is was called Polish anyways, it was just weird, but cool.

I still have my HP11C, bought in 1985. It's been used hard for a large chunk of that time, and is still on its original batteries.

A lot of the cult-of-HP comes from that level of build quality, and a lot of it comes from the RPN notation, which takes a little getting used to but is extremely flexible and powerful in actual use.

So to calculate (1+2)*(2+3) you would:

a) normal calculator of the day: 2, +, 3, =. store, 1, +, 2, =, *, recall, =
b) HP RPN calculator: 1, 2, +, 2, 3, +, *
c) modern parenthesizing calculator: (, 1, +, 2, ), *, (, 2, +, 3, ), =

The RPN calculator has them all beat for speed, and is an even bigger win once the calculations get complex - even something like "5 + ((1 + 2) * 4) − 3" could get pretty annoying with a normal algebraic calculator of the day because you would generally have to calculate the parenthesized pieces separately and write them down, then re-enter these values to calculate the final value of the equation, while the HP could evaluate it in one pass: "5 1 2 + 4 * + 3 -".

It's called Reverse Polish Notation because it's a reversed form of Polish Notation, which is so-named because its inventor was the Polish mathematician Jan Łukasiewicz. At one time I made a decent living programming in the Forth programming language, which was an entirely reverse Polish notation language. The programming language Lisp is a nearly exclusively normal Polish notation language.

sorry, all I've got is a 20s that I haven't used in years.

used to drive all my friends nuts too. They had to take a calculator class freshman year in basic math I tested out of it, and so was able to use my HP while they had to pony up for TI's that personally just sucked.

Nowdays however all I calculate is my checkbook balance, and if I need a scientific calculator for that it means I have spent way to much or my accounting method might be considered questionable by the IRS.

Hmm,
got a few really nice slide rules I could lend you guys if you wanted to do REAL math

Tony

Tony I thought you were going to say you had one. I was pretty sure you didn't have any of these newfangled electronic calculating devices cluttering up your space