hp calculators and spaghetti sandwiches

Hello blogoshpere. This is the first post of my first blog. I hope you like it and that it reflects my crazy personality.

Up front: I love my Lord and I love my wife. I love my daughter, my mother, family and friends.

But this is hp calculators and spaghetti sandwiches. This post will focus on my first hp calculator--the 21S Stat/Math calculator. OK, it's really high on that list, but I wouldn't really say I 'love' my 21S. Wait, I do love my 21S. It came into my life at just the perfect time--I was a newlywed half way through grad school in statistics with a serious deficit in handheld computing power. This particular calculator was a blessing from on high (literally) purchased with gift certificates won from a radio station's back to school promotion back in 1989. I used my 21S through the remainder of grad school and three jobs before it began to fail.

Its most useful feature was its four built-in statistical distributions--z, t, F and Chi-squared. Given a test statistic (and the appropriate degrees of freedom, etc.) the calculator returned upper tail probability and vice-versa. Its biggest drawback was its algebraic data entry which was a break from hp's well-developed RPN. This keystroke-programmable was an outstanding calculator for this poor statistics grad student.

Do you or did you use an hp 21S? What do you think was its most useful feature?

Stay tuned. Spaghetti sandwiches and lots of other topics will come in the future.