But can your calculator run Linux?

Posted by jandeboevrie 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by DrewADesign 1 day ago

I use the Prime G2 daily. I VERY much prefer RPN, love that I can program it with Python (and occasionally PPL,) and am often in environments where having a backlit screen is a lot more convenient than pulling out a flashlight. Linux on it would be a fun novelty, but the clunkiness would make it a lot less useful to me. The big collection of physical buttons behaving predictably without needing to look at the screen is super useful. Otherwise I’d just use my phone.

Comment by anthk 1 day ago

Install emacs with gnuplot and run M-x calc.

Comment by DrewADesign 1 day ago

And reprogram all of the keys to do the things they already do so I can wind up with the same exact functionality I had before, only with more steps? Probably not. I’m using a calculator because it’s a more efficient task-specific interface for computation.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by gorkish 1 day ago

Yes, in fact it can.

[1] https://calculinux.org/

Comment by vimredo 18 hours ago

For that project to work, you have to replace the brains of the PicoCalc with something that can run Linux, so you might as well just connect the display of a Ti-84 up to a Raspi with an adapter board and advertise it as "running Linux".

Comment by thelibrarian 1 day ago

But can your Linux run calculator?

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by nc55g3g 21 hours ago

Poor calculator

Comment by stackghost 1 day ago

These calculators are, without question, excellent little devices and the HP ones in particular had great engineering behind them. I had an HP48 in undergrad, which was considered pretty much mandatory for engineering. There was a thriving student sneakernet of programs you could get that would trivialize certain problems. Some friends had the HP49G which was, in my opinion, a step down in terms of build quality. Years later I bought an HP50 which was the best of both worlds.

I still have my HP50 but there's just no reason to use it. Anywhere I go I either have my phone or a computer. When I was in the air force I would have to go into EMSEC zones where you couldn't bring external devices, such as SCIFs, but the number of people with needs to be running engineering calculations in such an environment rounds down to 0. Certainly I wasn't one of them.

Even "in the field" nowadays, you're likely to have satellite connectivity and a laptop. There's just not really a use case for graphing calculators that I can think of. It's too bad, because they're awesome.

Comment by NetMageSCW 1 day ago

I still have my 50g on my work desk for one reason - to do calculations with units. Admittedly I use emulation on my phone mostly, but the 48-50 units calculations are still the best I’ve used. (But if I don’t need units I use my SM 42).

Comment by stackghost 1 day ago

MathCAD or GNU units work well enough for me

Comment by shevy-java 1 day ago

If a toaster can run on Linux,

so can a calculator.

(NetBSD used to have that slogan with regards to toasters. I have not followed it for several years, so I don't know which operating system dominates toasters nowadays.)

Comment by ButlerianJihad 1 day ago

There was not a "slogan" but an inside joke, and you've reversed the sense of said joke.

In response to the joke about BSD running on a toaster, some joker created and documented a "toaster running BSD" which was accomplished by bypassing the toaster circuits and adding a motherboard with CPU, memory, storage and I/O.

Now those all make for good jokes, but it does not mean that toaster hardware is POSIX-ready, any more than a Macintosh SE is suitable as an aquarium.