HP 48G

Let me introduce you to my beloved calculator, the HP 48G. It is a marvel of engineering, for engineering. When I started into my engineering program at BYU, fully accepted program that is, I scrounged up enough money to buy an HP 28s. It made the program doable. It could do what I needed to pass my classes, like vector and matrix math and algebra.

Fast forward a few years. I am in my first paying job. I'm considering starting a master's degree at some point in the future (Tracy's came first though). My 28s is beaten to the point where I have to hold it together to keep the battery connected. Another BYU graduate that worked there mentions going to go up to BYU to register or some such. It also coincides with BYU's Bookstore Alumni Sale. That is like 20% off anything and everything. I'm still too broke to go up to Utah much and certainly not up to Provo. So, somehow I convince Tracy to depart with our huge stockpiles of cash and have him purchase a new 48G for me. I loved my calculator. I felt naked without it and certainly, my 28S was on life support.

So I purchased it. Didn't use it. We moved to Illinois. Tracy started her graduate program and I was working for Motorola. I had more computing power around me than I thought possible. I didn't need the calculator. I started my degree program. Still didn't need the calculator as it was a computer degree and has surprisingly little math. I think in the 24 years I've had this, I've used it for taxes every other year or so. (Notice in the upper right corner, it states it has 32KB of memory.)

So I'm tooling around the interwebs and for some unknown reason, I stumble upon an emulator for my phone of the 48 Series of calculators. FREE!. I paid over $250 for my original and here some jag with too much time on his hands puts one out there for free. Well, yeah. I'm all over this thing.

FREE! Look at it! Isn't it beautiful? It's on my freaking phone! My phone that has 1,000,000x the memory of the actual calculator!

Is life beautiful or what!??!