12:58, Tuesday 10 Jun., 2003 Link

An Introduction to Reverse Polish Notation [kind of via sippey]. The first calculator I ever used was RPN (my dad had an HP one), which was much more in line with how maths was taught at school. The first time I used a conventional calculator (a Casio which was a present to my mum), the button order was very confusing. Some see alsos...

• Harold Thimbleby's calculator resources [thanks Owen Massey] is a collection of his papers and lectures on calculator history and design. He argues that the interface is needlessly complex, and a modeless interface is a good alternative. There's an implementation of this, as a Mac OS X application.
• Neville Holmes' Truth and Clarity in Arithmetic (in IEEE Computer, February 2003, but unfortunately available for purchase only if you're not a subscriber) argues for calculators more suited for counting operations, not floating point ones. This is more in line with basic numeracy, he says, and then proposes a different set of keys -- hard to explain here, I wish the pdf was online so I could point to it. (But Holmes has footnotes to his column online.)
• Gizmodo's top gadgets of 1983 [thanks Tom C].

Enough! Enough!