On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 Dean.Benjamin at mm.com wrote: > I still have the HP-45 calculator that I bought as a junior at the U of > M. The HP-45 was the second hand-held calculator produced by HP, > following the HP-35 which debuted in 1972, my freshman year. > Calculators were so outrageously expensive at the time -- the HP-35 > initially cost $395; the HP-45, $800 I bought my first in 1974 during my junior year of HS. It was a Sears "Electronic Slide Rule." It had all the trig functions, log, etc., to 8 digits. I was amazed. It cost $108, I believe. It also dropped by 1/2 in about a year. I had saved my money from my paper route for months to buy that thing. It was definitely worth it. At that time, it was the only device anyone I knew had ever seen that could compute a log to 8 digits, for example, and it did it almost instantly. Sure, kids today have fancy computers, but they use them to send Chuck Norris jokes. But seriously, we installed Ruby on my kids' box and that language can really do arithmetic. He programmed it to do factorials and did 50000! with no problem. That was fun. Mike