HP 15C Collector’s Edition (preorder) (opens in new tab)

> my dream HP calculator is a 50G with an OLED display,

This is why I use the app on my phone. I really can't use my normal one without a backlight any more, just too hard to read.

And the Limited Edition was $139.99 when I got one in late 2012.

I think I got my original one in 1982 for under $100, because I got two discounts. When I went to the Caltech bookstore to buy one they were sold out, but had one for display that people could try out. They said I could buy that one at a discount. There were no signs of any wear or abuse from the people who had tried it, so I was willing to buy it.

But I noticed that it was using comma instead of period for the decimal point, and period instead of comma for the group separator. Neither I nor the salesperson knew that there was a setting to swap these. We though it must either be defective, or somehow the store had actually been sent a model went for one of the countries that uses that convention.

The store offered me another discount because of that swap. I thought a while and decided that I could get used to it, and accepted.

Build quality isn't quite as good as the original.

Well yes but back then it was pretty difficult tech.

The standby current of the original HP Voyager series was extremely low, a set of batteries (3 x LR44) would last a decade or longer. Even with batteries removed, the internal capacitor could retain the memory contents for hours.

I actually love RPN, but that's only since I've seen it explained a certain way, I think it was in a manual on the Forth language. RPN makes sense for a computer, because you first give it all the information it needs to do something with, and only then what to do with it. Doing it the "classic" way (3+5) makes much less sense, because you tell the computer: here's a bit of incomplete info (3), please perform this operation (+), and oh here's the rest of the info (5).

It also said that it's in a way closer to how humans think: I have two numbers, and I want to add them up.

For me it also helps to think that RPN is based on a stack. In "3 5 +", 3 and 5 are pushed onto a stack, and + pulls two numbers off the stack, adds them up and pushes the result (8) back on the stack.

Sadly, the keys of the previous "HP15C Limited Edition", which I bought in 2012 - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005EIG3MW - were also crap.

My original HP11C (from around its launch date in 1981) works as well or better at this point.