Sunday, May 22, 2016

A short description of the calculator.

A calculator, you say?

It's an HP48G/G+/GX. It was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, until a couple decades ago. It's the last, decent, old-school, HP calculator. Of course it's RPN only. That is because it was made before they bonked their heads on a wall, releasing the HP49G, before they went mad releasing the HP49G+ and before they went completely apeshit and releasing the HP50G. Now they write "apps" which you can run on your phone to do calculations. 

I've been using my gx for quite some time now. It's gotten me through the last year of high school, university, post-grad and (mandatory) army "service". It's as sturdy as a rock, as reliable as the sun rises every morning, it can be powered by a hamster running in a wheel and it's as fast as a sloth covered in molasses and stoned off his gourd.

My (computer's) graphics card, an AMD R9 380, claims memory transfer rates of about 180 GB/s. The computer's RAM, which is DDR4-2133, claims about 17 GB/s. My cellphone's RAM goes at about 15 GB/s. The HP48GX, you ask? 70 KB/s. Or, to put it in perspective, 0.00007 GB/s.

It's so slow that when you perform an addition, you can see the "busy" icon stay on for half a second.

Of course, this means I must try to write a game for it. An action game. With bullets, enemies, powerups, randomized levels and explosions and stuff.

I'm sure the DSM-V has a name for my condition.

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