A friend introduced me to the HP-40G in high school, while everybody was using TI or Casio.
Turns out these calculators can beep with a given frequency!
So I learned (some of) the physics of sound to be able to program music.
So it really pushed me to do more advanced maths and taught me programming, these are some fondly remembered days.
The symbolic computation GUI is also a marvel of design that is unsurpassed to this day, especially in how you can select semantic blocks with a keyboard, and how good the rendering is. It felt like a human-centric interface rather than a computer-centric one. Although the general UI of the calculator was more of a confusing mess, so it had its flaws.
Well, I got mine for cheap from another student who "bought this useless garbage" so it's not a universal point of view.
The symbolic computation GUI is also a marvel of design that is unsurpassed to this day, especially in how you can select semantic blocks with a keyboard, and how good the rendering is. It felt like a human-centric interface rather than a computer-centric one. Although the general UI of the calculator was more of a confusing mess, so it had its flaws.
Well, I got mine for cheap from another student who "bought this useless garbage" so it's not a universal point of view.