Slashdot Mirror

According to this history Moore added a push down stack around 1965 - While Polish and RPN had been around for some time since then I don't think there were too many calculators, probably some desktops, but the earliest HP calc I could find is this one - "In 1968, the Hewlett-Packard company was primarily a test equipment manufacturer." etc.

ZipGenius (http://www.zipgenius.it/) - If you've used WinZip then this is the best freeware to compare with it.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com/) - prefer this to Irfanview as a graphics editor.
Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/) - network sniffer.
Calc98 (http://www.calculator.org/download.html) - better calculator than the default Windows' version.
CDBurnerXP (http://www.cdburnerxp.se/) - Full featured freeware CD burning software package.
Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) - ultimate notepad replacement.
Max's HTML Beauty (http://www.htmlbeauty.com/) - full featured HTML editor.

And of course nonags.com is one of the first places I check for these kinds of things.

What do I use it for? What do I NOT use it for?!

reading ebooks every single day... in bed, on the couch, on the can: uBook
keeping track of miscellaneous bits of info (eg, project shopping lists): Noterrific
Listening to my MP3 collection, via earphones, over WLAN, while reading in bed: BetaPlayer
scientific calculator: Calc98
Getting online (via T-mo GSM phone & Bluetooth) anytime, anywhere. (In other words, I have Yahoo Yellow Pages in my pocket.)
All of my contacts and appointments kept in sync with home & work desktops: organizer software is built in but I bought Pocket Informant
Various games, of course
Keeping track of how much I spend on lunch: Pocket Excel
Taking notes in meetings: PhatPad
Storing every single number and password that plagues my life in a secure format: eWallet

Sure, it isn't as good as a laptop, but I can (and do) take it everywhere.

I am upgrading to one of the new VGA models shortly after they hit the streets. I have my eye on the Dell Axim X50V, which has specs similar to the HP 4700, but is less expensive.

I can't imagine not owning a nice PDA.

Reverse Polish notation was invented by an Australian in response to Polish notation, which was invented (gasp!) by a Pole.

The whole story here is

Reverse Polish notation was invented by an Australian in response to Polish notation, which was invented (gasp!) by a Pole.

The whole story here is

Polish Notation was invented in the 1920's by Polish mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz, who showed that by writing operators in front of their operands, instead of between them, brackets were made unnecessary. Although Polish Notation was developed for use in the fairly esoteric field of symbolic logic, Lukasiewicz noted that it could also be applied to arithmetic. In the late 1950's the Australian philosopher and early computer scientist Charles L. Hamblin proposed a scheme in which the operators follow the operands (postfix operators), resulting in the Reverse Polish Notation.

Check out this website here to find out what RPN really is.

I hope when he wrote- "Do companies still make calculators?", he meant 'still make RPN calculators.'

For those of us who aren't math geeks: What is Reverse Polish Notation?

Calc98 is a very good calculator for Windows 9x/NT and Pocket PC 2000/2002. It does dec/hex/oct/binary conversions, and does logic operations. I don't know if it does shift, but it wouldn't suprise me. And it has practically every constant known to man, including a periodic table, and does unit conversions for practically anything (Ever want to know the weight of Jupiter in Pennyweights? 1.22237x10^30) I recommend it for any engineering student, or for programming.

Hey, It's all about the stack...
&nbsp RPN stands for Reverse Polish Notation. The short history:
&nbsp In the 1920's Polish mathematician (and philosopher) Jan Lukasiewicz developed "Polish Notation" where the operators preceded the arguments. This was in the interest of simplifying symbolic algebra. Later in the 1960's HP found this to be an efficient method of performing calculations and implemented it, but instead had the operators entered after the arguments - hence REVERSE Polish Notation. This allowed intermediate calculation results to be kept on the stack and evaluated later WITHOUT ROUNDOFF ERROR that resulted from copying down the displayed results and entering them later. So not only was this more efficient, it also became a more accurate methodology! Due to the technological limitations of the time, it also allowed full algebraic calculations to be performed.
&nbsp You can read a lil more at the following sites: http://www.calculator.org/rpn.html http://www.hpmuseum.org/rpn.htm http://www-stone.ch.cam.ac.uk/documentation/rrf/rp n.html
&nbsp Best of luck going back to school. May you never stop learning!