PRESS YOUR FACE UP AGAINST THE SCREEN [467]

Well, my television broke again, losing power to the screen for the second time in four years, in the same way it happened last time. With the memory of the previous two-week wait for it to be fixed rising to the surface, I threw up my hands and bought a replacement. Provided this one lasts for a few more years, I have realised this may be the last regular television I will buy.

My first personal TV was a fourteen-inch cathode ray tube TV bought for £139 in 1996, weighed seven kilograms (15.4 lbs), had two one-watt speakers, no subtitles or teletext ability, and used approximately 150 watts an hour, CRT screens holding high voltages even after turn-off. The back of it was riven with ventilation holes, because they were surely needed.

My new TV, a Sharp 32FH8KA, weighs half as much, has a thirty-two-inch LED screen like my previous Toshiba model, but this time with high dynamic range so effective that the backlight can be turned down to save power. Along with two twelve-watt speakers that have some bass, the unit is only a few inches thick – the circuit board and connectors stick out from the back of the TV, and is the only part that remains ventilated, because the screen hardly produces any heat, and because so little energy is lost through heat, it only uses twenty-six watts an hour. It is also fully Android compatible, making it pretty much a computer, into which other computers can be connected. With inflation, £139 in 1996 is now £271 – this new TV cost only £199.

Aside from the minimum expectations of a TV’s ability having greatly expanded over time, connectivity has also greatly changed. I only ever connected a VHS video recorder to the old portable TV in the 1990s, via the single SCART connector, but I now have an Apple TV box – “Android” is something that other people do – a Blu-ray player, a separate DVD player that accepts region 1 DVDs from North America, and an Atari Flashback console, all connected at once, covering all possibilities. 

While I am happy with the speakers on my new TV, a sound bar is usually the first add-on others would buy nowadays, especially if streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC iPlayer are accessible through the TV itself – apart from the Sky Glass TV, made for subscribers to that service, TVs with built-in soundbars have not appeared, as if better sound is expected to be something that needs to be added to a TV. I could easily have bought a large computer monitor with enough connectors for what I require, but these doesn’t really exist either.

The ability to just buy an all-purpose screen may arrive if no unified decision is made on the future of broadcasting. It is not clear if “5G Broadcast”, using the mobile phone network to deliver TV signals, is the ultimate choice if more of the current TV signals are repurposed for mobile use, while satellite TV, my main source for “regular” broadcasts on my new TV, may only remain if Sky commits to continuing with it beyond the end of the 2020s – if not, why should SES build more Astra satellites? If then, my TV will become that all-purpose screen, but I should never fear, for the box and manual states it supports the H.265 video codec, should any UK broadcaster decide to start using it – that’s good, I suppose.

I’M COUNTING ON YOU, DEAR [453]

Apple's macOS 14 calculator

With Apple’s grafting of artificial intelligence onto the next updates of their devices’ operating systems, I found it hilarious that the addition of a calculator app to the iPad received so much anticipation. 

“Apple Intelligence” will only be available on certain devices with the necessary processors and RAM to undertake tasks inside the device - my iPhone 14 Pro, bought in late 2022, is not set up for it, but it does have a built-in calculator.

My owning many purpose-built calculators, filled with tangible, clicking buttons, has made Apple’s calculator app an afterthought for me for years, whether its face was inspired by the design philosophy of Braun and Dieter Rams or not. Turning your phone sideways to access scientific functions requires me to unlock the screen’s “portrait orientation” first, and when I do, there are no time calculation functions available. Screenshots of the replacement app appear to change the orientation issue at the very least. The calculation app I do use is Free42, recreating the advanced Hewlett-Packard HP42S, letting me use Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) as well.

Apple has a perfectly capable calculator app, available on its desktop and laptop computers, and it appears to be this which has formed the base of the new calculator for iOS and iPad OS. My reason for thinking this is recall of previous calculations, known under the skeuomorphic name of “Paper Tape” on macOS, and the addition of unit conversions, locating time functions there, and including currency conversions using data provided by Yahoo – I have never used this, as while this conversion rate may be of use to people working in finance, more useful to many more would be tourist rates, or even the rates that PayPal are currently using.

“Math Notes” is the major innovation on the new calculator app, supporting the handwriting of calculations and equations, which the app will then immediately solve, and re-solve if variables are changed – this was used by Apple as a further selling point for Apple Pencil, but using a finger will suffice. 

This feature feels like the endpoint of the various school calculator input methods like Sharp’s DAL (Direct Algebraic Logic) and Casio’s VPAM (Visually Perfect Algebraic Method) and Natural Textbook Display, all touted as innovations that help you input calculations like they are listed on the page. I have never got on with these, partly because this was not how I was taught maths at A-Level, which was to use the calculator to answer pieces of an equation, but use paper for the rest, and so I have always believed that just copying up the problem won’t help you understand it – you use these if you only need the answer, not an explanation of how you got there. At least Casio’s new scientific calculators rearranged themselves to make them more enticing to explore, something not required of Apple’s app.

Will I use the new app when my phone is updated? Probably not – while it is currently in beta mode, to be released later in 2024, I do not see the RPN option I use on Free42. With other apps having for years met the needs that Apple had not supplied with their own app, more features and customisation is required to match those offerings – either that, or add Math Notes to the desktop app, and put that on my phone.

BY PRESSING DOWN A SPECIAL KEY [410]

Back in 2019, at the end of my video about calculators, I recommended the Casio fx-991EX ClassWiz, a scientific calculator for students, as the best, most comprehensive and easy to use calculator you can buy. In 2023, I think it remains the best choice, because its replacement is not as friendly to use. Casio are also seemingly the only company still selling calculators in regular stores in the UK, making anything else harder to recommend to the average user.

The new Casio ClassWiz range, topped by the fx-991CW, makes more use of menus and phone-line apps to group together statistical, distribution, equation and matrix calculations, among others, that previously were accessed via a “shift” function on the main keyboard. This may prove useful in a teacher setting, but it does away with a layout that Casio has built on since its first pocket scientific calculator, the fx-10 of 1974, and has become intuitive through its use by generations of people, from children through to adult. 

However, the new Casio ClassWiz range won an iF Design Award in 2023 because, according to the iF International Forum Design’s website, it “is designed to make math[s] fun and accessible again amid an accelerating decline in mathematics students worldwide who equate math[s] with difficulty.” It also says the new user interface encourages curiosity and interest in students, making the calculator more than “a machine students ‘have to use’”.

This has the unfortunate side effect of having to select the “Calculate” option in order to enter 2 + 2 = 4. This situation is more common on graphing calculators, which are half-way to becoming computers, but not on something you can still buy for under £20 at a supermarket.

I have never thought that calculators were getting in the way of learning mathematics – a couple of teachers made it a turn-off at school, but others balanced them out. Gaining confidence with numbers was my reason for continuing the subject through to A-Level, and calculators were there as a useful tool to support the teaching. It was only later I found myself appreciating and collecting calculators for their design, and for how different scientific calculators arranged their functions for people to use.

I use time calculations at work, and the ClassWiz manual confirms this requires more key pressing, with the function used to separate degrees/hours, minutes and seconds, and marked as °’”, now requiring you to press the “Shift” and “+” buttons to access, having previously been its own button.

The previous ClassWiz calculators incorporated use of “apps” in their menus without requiring menu diving to access functions, never having had to do so before doesn’t mean imposing such a system will become easier. It is worth noting that Hewlett-Packard reworked their 32S calculator in 1991, three years after its release, to unpack its menus onto a comparatively more cluttered keypad, but that version continued to sell for another eleven years.

It is not known if Casio have stopped selling the fx-991EX ClassWiz in favour of the new CW version, but they still sell many calculators using the old layout, and other names like Sharp, Texas Instruments and HP still exist, so if you are buying a calculator for your child, make sure you know what features they need to include, and make sure they read the instructions.

FA, A LONG, LONG WAY TO RUN [345]

In asking myself what a skill for life would be, learning a musical instrument was my immediate answer. There is a level of dedication and devotion implied by competently playing a melody, let alone being able to improvise one – that is the difference between knowing the right notes and learning your scales.

The latter of these has eluded because I have been so concentrated on the former, and the time has come for me to learn properly to play even better. However, like solving quadratic equations, learning what notes form the key of G major appears to be just something you must learn, with no shortcut or mnemonic.

To clarify, musical scales are predominant in Western music and culture, consisting of eight notes in sequence relating to the first, “tonic” note, the last note being the first when played one octave higher. To our ears, playing in the right key is the same as playing “in tune”, without “hitting the wrong note”. The names given to the two types of scale, “major” and “minor”, are based on importance and use. 

As it turns out, major keys are comparatively easy. C major is the one that everyone can do, because it has no sharp or flat notes - it only uses the white notes on a keyboard. Looking at a keyboard indicates how the major scale is formed: there are 12 notes from one C note to the next, known as semitones – skipping a black key implies a step of two semitones, or a whole tone. There are no black keys between the E and F key, or between B and C, and the gap between these is one semitone. 

Therefore, the gaps between the notes in C major are tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Repeating this in G major requires you to use a black key, F sharp (F#), to fulfil the pattern, and to play “God Save the Queen”. Every major key follows this pattern: starting on E flat (Eb), you play Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb, C, D, Eb to make the key of Eb major, and the start of the “EastEnders” theme. Start on C#, and you can play my song “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” [link].

When people talk about minor keys, it is generally the “natural” minor keys have their own pattern. A minor, like C major, only uses the white keys, but starts three semitones lower, making a pattern of tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone – likewise, the equivalent of G major is E minor. There are “melodic” and “harmonic” variations that developed to fit certain intentions, but I can get more information on these once I nail the fundamentals down.

This is as far as I reached before needing to understand Western diatonic scales and the “circle of fifths”, but even the above proves there are certain assumptions that must be made before you begin to learn something, and things that you just must learn. There is no such thing as a shortcut to learning, except for making the size of the task feel less huge.

I AM ADDING AND SUBTRACTING, I'M CONTROLLING AND COMPOSING [200]

The script for this video is below:

Hello there, this is “Leigh Spence Is Dancing with The Gatekeepers,” I am Leigh Spence and, yes, I have been real all along. No internet characters for me, real life is more than enough. If you have come across from my website at [www.leighspence.net], thank you, and if something or someone has sent you in the direction of this video, welcome. 

This series is usually a written blog but, to mark article number two hundred, and because it is easier to show you my subject this time around, it is time to try something new. If you think this experiment has worked, and you would like to see more, please like, subscribe, ring the bell, all the usual stuff, and we’ll see where this goes.

We’ll come to our main subject of the HP-12 calculator in a moment, but just in case you were wondering, why is this called “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers”? Sounds a bit strong, doesn’t it? Well, the truth is I once had a dream where I recorded an electronic art-rock album titled, “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” where one of the tracks apparently had me yelling, “all they have are words” over and over again. The first article in the series, published in May 2016, ended like this: “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” could sound like a mystical battle of good versus evil, but it is much more positive to me: taking delight in the challenges life gives you, and having fun with those that think they have all the answers. It will be more about me trying to make sense of an issue, why I think the way I do, or why I am expected to think something, rather than coming to a decision. Ultimately, I want this to be a fun exploration of the stories we tell ourselves.

One month later, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and five months after that, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Lucky me, so good thing I’ve also talked about the Futurist Cookbook, postmodernism, vaporwave, dead shopping malls, “Myra Breckenridge”, and Jeremy Beadle. That’s not stopping any time soon.

Another reason I have made a video at this point is that I’ve realised I can effectively make a video using stuff found around the house. If I bring out a mirror, I can show you what’s pointing at me because, let’s face it, YouTube is public access television, and we are all content creators now. All I had to buy was the tripod, but everything from my phone’s camera to the tablet autocue, and the microphone on my PC headphones, were waiting for me to say, “I know what I can do.” There is nothing to stop you from having a go.

Anyway, calculators. I usually use a song lyric when I write an article, so I will call this one: “I AM ADDING AND SUBTRACTING, I’M CONTROLLING AND COMPOSING.” Kraftwerk were never one for lyrics, were they? “I AM AN OPERATOR WITH MY POCKET CALCULATOR.”

When did you last buy a calculator? When did you last use one? Have you just bought your child a calculator for school? Do you still have the one YOU used at school? Or do you just use your phone? In the early 1970s, calculators were the first time that the power of computing was made available to everyone, but they had already become a commonplace, even mundane, item by the end of that decade, a feat later equalled by smartphones. And yet, I can’t do without them. I like the idea of having one to hand, to calculate those more pressing questions like, what is the speed of sound through custard, and what are my chances of actually winning the lottery? What is more, why buy a stress ball or a fidget spinner, when a calculator is literally a load of buttons? No wonder I’ve built up quite a collection...

[EXAMINE COLLECTION]

As you can see, a lot of my collection are scientific calculators of a certain vintage, mostly 1980s and 90s, back when they used to cost a bit more. What I have seen now is that, while your standard, four-function calculators have been ten a penny for decades now, even scientific calculators have reached the level where they can be found as disposable tat. That gives me an idea...

[ASHENS PARODY]

However, I want to focus on perhaps the most bizarre calculator of them all. It is a financial calculator, so let’s bring up some pictures of the City of London, where some people may still be stubbornly using it over Microsoft Excel. It has been on sale for nearly forty years now, despite the constant attempts by its producer to make and sell faster, more capable and easier to use machines. You’re already ahead of me if you read the title of the video – it’s the HP-12C.

...and here it is again. There are many videos on YouTube that provide tutorials on how this works, so it’s a big hello to you if you clicked on this one by accident – I can only apologise.

The HP-12C went on sale in 1981. By this point, Hewlett-Packard had introduced “shirt pocket power” with the first scientific calculator, the HP-35 in 1972 – by the way, I’m only quoting what it said in the manual. “Our object in developing the HP-35 was to give you a high precision portable electronic slide rule. We thought you’d like to have something only fictional heroes like James Bond, Walter Mitty or Dick Tracy are supposed to own.” Hilarious to read now, but the HP-35 instantly threw away hundreds of years of using slide rules and logarithm tables. General Electric ordered twenty thousand of them immediately. 

By 1981, HP introduced a range of cheaper calculators, codenamed “Voyager,” all using the same horizontal case. The 10C, 11C and 15C were all scientific calculators of increasing ability, while the 16C was made for computer programmers. Note the ability to change mathematical bases, which I like to use to see what numbers come up. For example, the Book of Revelations states the Number of the Beast is 666, but in hexadecimal, that becomes 29A, or the House Number of the Beast. In Octal, it is 1232, the PIN number of the Beast, while in binary: 

 

[CLICK: ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO, 

ONE ONE ZERO ONE ZERO]

 

All of the Voyager range, bar the 12C, left the market before the end of the 1980s, overtaken by more capable machines. However, they are very highly sought after – if you can one under a hundred pounds, then get it straight away, because the average price is nearly two hundred pounds.

Why did the 12C stick around? While HP needed to make sure that trigonometric functions, reciprocals, exponentials, square root and so on were included on the first scientific calculator, the first financial calculator, the HP-80, would feature functions invented by HP – the “time value of money,” amortisation of loans, bond prices and yields, accumulated interest rates, mean and standard deviations, past and future dates, days between dates. You didn’t need to know why they work, only that they do. No wonder the manual for the 12C includes a disclaimer advising HP takes no responsibility for the answers their machines create, or any risk that comes from acting upon the answers. It is also why the manual makes sure you know the basics of financial calculators before telling you how to turn the thing on, on page 16.

Taking a look at the 12C, it includes all the usual functions like amortisation of loans – literally how much the payments will cost to kill the loan off - bond prices, depreciation, interest and date calculation. Everything is easy to calculate, because instructions are included on the back. The gold colour distinguishes it from the rest of the Voyager range, and confirms it means business. Also, when the heat is on, the metal construction means the calculator will cool your face. 

I will include at this point that HP calculators are famous for their build quality. Bill Hewlett, the “H” in HP, accidentally dropped an HP-35 when demonstrating it to a client, proving such a sensitive piece of machinery could survive being used in everyday life. Meanwhile, a zookeeper wrote to HP explaining their 12C, which they used to work out feed levels, had been accidentally dropped into a bucket, and eaten by a hippopotamus. When it was eventually recovered, it worked absolutely fine.

You may have noticed there is no equal button. A hallmark of HP calculators is “Reverse Polish Notation”, which basically means that you enter your numbers first, then say what you want to do with them – instead of saying that three plus four equals seven, you say that you are taking three and four, and adding them together. This is why there are no brackets – you don’t need them. You can also stack up to four answers, which means if you want to add this together, you have to do this:

[(3+4) x (5+6)]

Three enter four plus, five enter six plus, multiply, seventy seven

Something you often find on older calculators is the screen blanking out when you press a key, or when it is processing an answer – this is due to the speed of the processor. What I haven’t seen before is this: if I enter the date I am recording this on, 26^th September 2019, and see what the date is a hundred and fifty dates from now, you get “running, running, running,” then the answer of 24^th January 2020. I guess it’s better than a blank screen, and thinking you broke your device.

The serial number of this model means it was made in 1991, which means there had already been a couple of revisions to the original processor, due to changes in manufacturing, but what I don’t get is this: a faster processor was put in, but it was throttled to the same speed as the original one. Why? If it didn’t work in exactly the same way as the previous versions, would it be less trustworthy? Possibly – business has different priorities from maths and science, and if you’re a company like Goldman Sachs, which used to give every new employee a 12C, you want everything to work in the way you expect, even if you have to make it worse? 

In 2003, HP introduced the 12C Platinum, not Silver, Platinum, Platinum. You now have the option of an equal button, you now have brackets, and a modern ARM processor replaces the original HP “Nut.” A very modern machine. However, you can still buy the original... [PRESS BOTH CALCULATORS TO FACE]

Spreadsheets should have taken over financial calculators entirely by now but, like scientific calculators, you still need them for education, and you still need them for exams. Only four calculators are permitted for use in Chartered Financial Analyst and Chartered Management Accountant exams, and the 12C and 12C Platinum are two of them. The other two are by Texas Instruments: their BAII Plus, and the BAII Professional. They cover all the main functions, and nothing more. No short cuts, no fancy menus. They have been the go-to devices for so long, there is little point in buying or making anything else, or buying and making anything better.   

Incidentally, both HP and TI’s financial calculators are made for them now, by a company based in Taiwan. Kinpo Electronics also produce calculators for Casio and Canon. The old calculator arms race must be over if they are all coming from the same place.

I should explain that. The early years of calculators really was a race. Texas Instruments created the first prototype for a four-function calculator, known as the “Cal-Tech” prototype, in 1967, but like the production version they made with Canon, the Pocketronic of 1969, they used a paper tape to display the results. Sharp were the first to use an electronic display, on their EL-8 in 1971, but once TI started making their processors available to buy, and once they started selling their own calculators in 1973, the prices of machines crashed – from hundreds of pounds in 1970, to under £10 by 1975. Trying to undercut TI, other calculator makers like Commodore started buying up companies that made their own chips. In Commodore’s case, buying one company, MOS Technology, brought them into contact with the engineer Chuck Peddle, who told them to get into making computers instead, as calculators will become a dead end. The first Commodore computer, the PET, appeared in 1977, and the MOS 6502 processor found in it can also be found in the Commodore VIC-20 and 64, the Apple II, the BBC Micro, the Atari 2600, the Acorn Electron, and some game machine produced by Nintendo. Texas Instruments ultimately failed at home computers, but did invent the Speak & Spell.

Where are calculators now? If you live in the UK, calculators are made by Casio and... that’s about it. If you live in the United States, you could say the same with Texas Instruments. If you want a scientific calculator, it will most likely have the words “Natural Display,” or “Classwiz,” written on it, because the focus is on education, and on how equations work, rather than just entering the numbers. At the same time, the graphing calculator is the last major calculator battle between Casio, HP and Texas Instruments [TI INSPIRE] – honestly, there just aren’t enough buttons on that. 

What is the best calculator to buy? Obviously, it depends on what you need. There is a reason why Casio and TI are the best-known brands, it is because they are the most comprehensive, the easiest to use, and they are what everyone else has. I honestly think the Casio FX-991EX Classwiz is the best, most comprehensive calculator on sale today, and has been made to be perfect for GCSE and A-Level students. But my favourite calculator to use? [HOLDING UP HP-12C] How about the one so perfect that no-one wants to let it go? 

Thank you for listening and watching. Again, if would like to see more please like, subscribe, or ring the bell. In the meantime, the nostalgia culture crisis continues every week at [www.leighspence.net].