It was Hewitt Packard's first scientific calculator.
Priced at $395, over $2,000 in today's money due to absurd inflation, it was aimed at a specialized market.
It was also, quite obviously, the shape of things to come.
I've never been very good at math.
I'm not sure why, I wish I was. I'm better than some, but when I get into more advanced math. . . well I'm just not great.
My father, on the other hand, was great at math. And my grandfather on his side, who died long before I was born, was so good at math that he helped my father and his siblings with their high school calculus even though he'd left school at age 13.
My father tried to help me, but to no avail.
I first had a calculator at some point in junior high, so calculators must have come on really quickly. Mine was a Casio. It worked for years and years, but by the time I was in high school it had apparently already become obsolete, as my next one was some sort of Texas Instrument.
Not the really great Texas Instrument, which I wouldn't have really needed anyhow.
My last year of high school math was when I was a junior. It was geometry and I struggled in it. Later on, you couldn't have gotten away with only three semesters of high school mathematics, but I did then. I had my TI in that class, but it never worked right after I dropped it out of my Jeep one day upon coming home from school, and it spent a cold night on the driveway. No matter, I didn't take any more math in high school anyhow.
Then at Casper College I had to make up essentially an entire high school mathematics curriculum in one semester. I did it, but it was awful.
We weren't allowed to use calculators in that class.
My next one was a statistical calculator that we could use in statistics at the University of Wyoming. It was a great calculator, and that was a great and fun class.
At UW, as a geology major, I had to take through, if I recall correctly Calc 3. I did it, but I still can't say that I'm very good at really advanced mathematics, sadly.
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