{"id":10332,"date":"2014-01-09T11:36:59","date_gmt":"2014-01-09T16:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=10332"},"modified":"2017-09-06T21:02:49","modified_gmt":"2017-09-07T01:02:49","slug":"the-hp48-the-best-calculator-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/09\/the-hp48-the-best-calculator-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"The HP48: the best calculator ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had an unscheduled overnight stop in East Lansing last week, and I took the chance to visit the MSU Surplus Store<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 For $15, they had HP48G calculators, seemingly unused:<\/p>\n

\"hp48g\"<\/a>They still have a bunch of them: HP 48G Graphic Calculator<\/a>.<\/del><\/p>\n

They’re maybe not the quickest (the 4 MHz Saturn processor chugs sometimes, and wanders off to clean up memory when it feels like it), the display is downright chunky these days, but they have everything that a scientific calculator should have. The keys have a good action. It just works. Yes, your smartphone has hundreds of times the processing power, but it’s not specialized to the task. The HP48 is.<\/p>\n

If you’re feeling really nerdy, you can run an HP48 (a GX, not the G which I have) under Linux using x48<\/a>. Jeff has some useful tips on installing x48 on newer ubuntu versions<\/a> (though you don’t have to do the font thing under Ubuntu 13.10<\/del>).<\/p>\n

\"x48\"<\/a>Building it is a small matter of .\/autogen.sh ; .\/configure ; make ; sudo make install<\/span>.\u00c2\u00a0 To run it, you’ll need to install the GX ROM<\/a> image to ~\/.hp48<\/span>.\u00c2\u00a0 The first time you run it, I’d recommend running it from the terminal with:<\/p>\n

x48 -connFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -smallFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -mediumFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -largeFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-16 -reset -initialize -rom ~\/.hp48\/rom<\/pre>\n
as the ROM format has an outdated config file which causes it to complain weakly every time you start the emulator.<\/p>\n
Scanned manuals are available from HP and archive.org here: HP 48g User Guide<\/a>, HP 48g Quick Start Guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had an unscheduled overnight stop in East Lansing last week, and I took the chance to visit the MSU Surplus Store.\u00c2\u00a0 For $15, they had HP48G calculators, seemingly unused: They still have a bunch of them: HP 48G Graphic Calculator. They’re maybe not the quickest (the 4 MHz Saturn processor chugs sometimes, and wanders […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[692,921,2767,270,181,581,2766,2768,305,2769],"class_list":["post-10332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-calculator","tag-hp","tag-hp48","tag-linux","tag-michigan","tag-msu","tag-rpn","tag-surplus","tag-ubuntu","tag-x48"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-2GE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10332"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14292,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10332\/revisions\/14292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}