Right to Repair Nightmare - HP 48SX

[@gu4xinim]

The Rossman impersonation was gold. Got me at "also NYC is dead"

[@Scrlk95]

on point!

[@nathanferch5375]

Had me crying!

[@mattanimation]

Hey everybody!

[@illustriouschin]

And it's true that Louis has the Shatner Staccato.

[@bastianfromkwhbsn8498]

Perfection! BTW Louis was only 2 yo when this calculator was made... Time flies...

[@invetegon4596]

hearing you call your self a "has-been corporate youtuber" really hit me right in the feels. You're the one who introduced me to the world of electronics.

[@olik136]

turns out though that the non corporate videos are way more fun to watch- so I am ok with that

[@goeland4585]

Well he kinda _was_ a corporate youtuber, but a has-been? I think he's doing alright :)

[@jolyontayrol1028]

I reckon he called himself a has-Ben corporate youtuber.

[@goeland4585]

@@jolyontayrol1028 now you're Ben-ding the truth

[@FluffyTheGryphon]

It's funny how fast the years have flown by... I've been following his stuff since the days of yore when he was building PCs into cardboard beer cases. I guess I never really thought of him as a corporate youtuber, since that time was such a brief period of his internet presence.

[@EEVblog]

Haven't watched this, but let me guess, the infamous HP calc heat stakes.

[@MrCommodorebob]

Yep! You got it lol.

[@brodriguez11000]

@@MrCommodorebob : A Dremel would have worked better.

[@thomasesr]

Unbelieveble! (In fake EEVblog Ben Heck accent)

[@tubejay1]

It sold for $350 in the early 90's. Which is about $700 in today's dollars. So yeah. a ton for a calculator.

[@gavincurtis]

I had one since college until it was stolen from my desk 20 years later. They feel absolutely "monolithic" in the hand, as if one solid piece like our modern smartphones. I bet that is why they used all the plastic welds.

[@chouseification]

Yeah it was really expensive - one of my friends had one and even had the chemistry addon card. It had an infrared modem feature so you could send messages (or more typically programs or data) between two of them. What I didn't like at all (it makes sense from a computation standpoint but not from a user interface standpoint) was the RPN. first number, Enter, second number, plus... yuck. Give me parens to nest. :D Instead I bought (still have it and it still works fine) a TI-85 - the pimp daddy of the TI calculators at that time. Nearly as feature packed (but with an even better graphing display) but half the cost - and since most curriculum back then assumed (if not outright asserted) that you had a TI-81 (the blue colored basic model), I was golden. One really funny thing about the TI-85 is that it can run Basic code and with tricks you can run assembly, so yes I did have a copy of Tetris on my calculator back in the early 90s. It played almost as well as the Game Boy version, so not bad! :D

[@jurjenbos228]

But worth every dollar. This calculator had functions that weren't available anywhere else, like integration, solving equations. Wolfram Alpha wasn't there yet...

[@braddirt]

Today, a $700 laptop would make it look... Like a toy. While you could use this for engineering today, I really just wouldn't and it probably is why my dad's is still in a box in the garage.

[@jkholtgreve]

Industrial tech is always so amazing to see. Like we all lament planned obsolescence but it doesn’t hit home until you see what the same manufacturers are capable of when targeting enterprise users. I’ve got a couple PDAs that are built so rock solid that I literally ran over one and it works just fine. When I start making money again I’ll probably end up buying a Toughbook because I’m sick of how flimsy even the best consumer laptops are. This stuff is always worth every penny if you can afford it.

[@thejeffchen]

I laughed hard when it finally spilled all the plastic rivets!

[@megan_alnico]

I miss grunge, buckling spring keyboards, easy software piracy, Babylon 5, newsgroups, and badass vampires that didn't glitter, mostly Underworld and Vampire: The Masquerade.

[@oldguy9051]

> Vampire: The Masquerade You have a point right there, Megan!

[@Hagledesperado]

BBS piracy is best piracy

[@illustriouschin]

Pepperidge Farm Remembers. ™

[@BenHeckHacks]

Don't forget POGS!

[@megan_alnico]

@@BenHeckHacks WOW I remember kids at school having those. I was too busy being wildly antisocial.

[@timothystevenhoward]

I still use my TI85 from 1994. A lot of my Electrical Engineering friends had that HP.

[@SnickersDoge]

Got games on your phone

[@_droid]

Still use mine too. I used it in college then my kids used it in college. Gotten a lot of work out of that thing.

[@tomf3150]

Still have the gx version

[@kippie80]

You can get it now on your phone! Free42

[@TheNefastor]

Guilty as charged :-D

[@janbiedermann1398]

Ben Heck got so much better since he "does not care anymore" :D

[@blackomega2526]

I was thinking louis the whole time seeing right to repair...and i died when you did the impersonation him.

[@GrandTheftWatto]

"In the arms oooffff a goblin...fly away from here..."

[@sexkrazedpanda]

Great Rossmann impression.

[@knightcrusader]

No reference to Mr. Clinton. Such a bummer.

[@dieSpinnt]

Dave "Rolling Stones" Jones (EEVBlog) also was a Bobby Dazzler.

[@iStormUK]

I'm a Louis Rossman fangirl, but my goodness, you got him nailed with that impersonation XD

[@Gigabyte1002]

Ben, you're awesome. You'd probably be so much fun to hang out with I'm sure. Lots of good laughs.

[@aswells3]

Union calculator man is my hero for his flatulent prowess.

[@Rickmakes]

When I was in high school in the nineties, most people drove cars from the eighties. I remember when cars with shoulder belts in he rear were fancy new cars. Same with air bags and third brake lights. My kid will look at cars without adaptive cruise control as being old.

[@goeland4585]

"What? I have to actually drive?? That's so 2020"

[@waltercomunello121]

"back in the day we had to actually _steer_ cars!" "wait whaaaa??"

[@chrisbrooks6697]

Or those with an internal combustion engine...

[@dieSpinnt]

I share your nostalgia:) But only to a degree. ABS and the other assistant systems including airbags saved many many lives! That of course doesn't mean the manufacturers have to make it impossible to repair. I don't mean fiddling with the highly integrated safety systems, but damned spark-plugs and their friends alike ... :/

[@trevorhaddox6884]

"They totally take product numbers being cursed into account..." the Eico 666 tube tester begs to differ.

[@Netbug]

I just realized, you could be doing literally anything and it would barely change how great your videos are. You could be making a salad and it would only be mildly less interesting.

[@BenHeckHacks]

I have a couple cooking videos on here if you scroll back in time.

[@NipkowDisk]

Still have my 48SX from late 1991 which was given to me as a present for getting a permanent position with a state DOT. It paid for itself many times over, as did the 48GX and 50G successors which I also bought. HP should have retained RPL compatibility with their Prime series but unfortunately they did not... I have over 25 years' worth of programming in my 50G!!

[@OveropinionatedAzhat]

oh jeez, I had forgotten how much I hated hearing that Bryan Adams song every 10 minutes on the radio back then...

[@aphantasiagreyman8445]

I've repaired a lot of these, 48SX, 48G and 48GX. You totally ruined this unit for no good reason. LCD and zebra strips from a donor 49G and you would have been in business for the next 20 years.

[@brodriguez11000]

Considering I need a display that's good to know. Hard part of a lot of old electronics is finding parts.

[@ROGUPA]

I have a 48sx with a blackened display, I don't know if it turns on. I can't see anything on its display. Can you help?

[@brodriguez11000]

@@ROGUPA : Make sure you don't have the contrast turned all the way up first.

[@ROGUPA]

@@brodriguez11000 it is not :-(

[@TheNefastor]

I had one of those as a kid. I was an RPL maniac. I grew up to be a rocket scientist. Someone stole it from me at the university, I still wish every misfortune and calamity on whoever stole it.

[@MichaelJantzen42]

I had one of those - used it through college. Mine has the equation editor card inside it (which was mega handy in chemistry and physics). Mine has the exact same columns out on it... and mine was made in Corvallis Oregon too! Edit: should say I still have it.

[@sheahawes6444]

I still have mine, bought it my senior year in high school in Eugene during a state track meet and then took it to college in Corvallis. Never knew they were built at the HP plant there. By the time I got to college with it, the 48GX was available.

[@bterjung]

I got my 48SX my freshman year at Purdue in 1990/91 and also had that equation editor. The periodic table was fantastic! Anyway, I have used that same calculator all throughout my engineering career and still use it to this day in 2022!

[@MichaelJantzen42]

@@bterjung Does yours have any display issues? I found it amusing that mine has the exact same columns out as the video - so I thought maybe there was some longevity issue there.

[@bterjung]

@@MichaelJantzen42 It actually does not! I'm really surprised because I distinctly remember spilling Hydro-Iodic Acid on the screen and the screen's edge during my chemistry lab my freshman year too! I seem to recall it being a pretty high molarity too. I quickly wiped it up but thought the calculator was a goner. Here it is still working flawlessly over 30 years later!

[@MichaelJantzen42]

@@bterjung That is incredible - my calculator just saw math classes and physics labs and the display is still slowly dieing :). Ah well.

[@mikeworkman3593]

I worked at a McDonalds in 1993. The Big Mac or the 2 Cheeseburger value meal were both $2.99. Like $0.50 to supersize it. A QuarterPounder meal was like $3.29 or $3.49

[@panpaletkalg2550]

Union Calculator Man deserves at least a comic book or two

[@MattMcIrvin]

...Within the HP-fan community, the RPL models were controversial because their programming model was such a departure from what had come before: the stack was unlimited depth apart from total memory (which in the first model, the underpowered 28C, was a real problem); the stack and variables could store ANYTHING, including programs, matrices, lists, graphical images etc.; it was a strongly typed functional language revolving around list processing. And you could enter and manipulate algebraic expressions in algebraic form, rather than RPN, which to the hardcore RPN fanatics was anathema. They were some of the earliest calculators to have any degree of CAS capability, though initially this was very limited. It was mind-blowing just to see that at all at the time, that there was a calculator that could do symbolic algebra and symbolic calculus. (Numerical integration had been a thing HP scientific calculators could do for a long time, and of course these could do that too.) Something that HP kind of lost in later devices was that everything was tightly integrated and consistent--any type of object could go on the stack, anything could be input to a function, every subsystem's output could be used by anything else. My understanding is that in their more recent calculators, a lot of the really powerful capability is siloed into apps that don't necessarily talk to one another, as if they knew they were catering to students who just wanted to master this week's unit in math class and move on to something else.

[@ZSNOF]

Gold has no flavor because it's unreactive c:

[@DingleFlop]

Inert!

[@eugenenine]

Why did you destroy it instead of searching how to remove the overlay? IPA softens the adhesive so it can be removed easily

[@wolvenar]

Man we missed you at VCF Midwest this year. Thanks for the entertainment.

[@oskrpnk666]

9:30 best impersonation of Louis Rosman ever 😂

[@hanznel8488]

Still have my 48S from 1991. Was cheaper than the SX, as a student on a scholarship I had to save wherever I could. Had to get a programmable calculator for a applied math course. Back then the choice was between HP or Casio. TI was basically non existent in our market.

[@yjk_ch]

Finally, a calculator that is even more destructive than Gamer Nexus's Stadia controller teardown.

[@John_Ridley]

The thing is, unlike TI calculators, the HPs just pretty much didn't break. I went to Michigan Tech in the 80s and I worked at a store that sold HP. I can't tell you how many times we had people come in and finally buy an HP after having trashed three TIs in 2 years. It doesn't take many times of your calculator failing in the middle of an exam, and realizing it only EVER happens to people with TIs, to give up and buy an HP. Not to mention that once you use RPN, everything else is stupid. I mean algebraic is OK if you want to multiply two numbers, but if you're working on complex stuff RPN rules.

[@erikengstrom6637]

Dang I wish I had not thrown out my broken HP 48GX if I knew it had a gold circuit board. Most entertaining tear down I have ever watched. Thank you!

[@LathanM]

I still have both my SX and GX. The fact you could store formulas and it also was a serial terminal made it the best pocket companion when I was college. I still have the serial cable from mine and last used it to test an old router. It was a vault to open. You had to cut 2 pins at thr top.

[@charlesjmouse]

PS: Why are second hand Smart Cars so cheap? Like all Mercs they contain lockout ID codes in every electrical sub-system that only Merc main dealers have the software to deal with. The result is perfectly good second hand Smart cars are now worthless because nearly *any* repair / replacement must be done at a Merc dealer at prices that are often more than the worth of the car these days!!! Basically good cars that might have another 30 years in them are now scrap because of Merc's greed! Screw the planet, eh? ...breathe... I rather like the Russian definition of 'reliability'. A 'reliable' device is not necessarily something that will always work but something that can always be repaired.

[@ToTheGAMES]

The person sending this to you knew what he was doing. I love it!

[@mrfilipelaureanoaguiar]

The golden nightmare of the 3 HP lines

[@inspiredtiny]

That calculator is a bleeding edge technology... uses plasti rivets... HP want you to bleed... That is the reason they lose in the calculator war. Very expensive and impossible to repair.

[@straightpipediesel]

Nothing to do with reparability. HP made engineer's, scientist's and banker's calculators. All of these universally switched to doing work on computers, with spreadsheets and environments like Matlab and Python, not on paper with a calculator. The only people needing advanced calculators are schoolchildren, which TI marketed to.

[@brodriguez11000]

@@straightpipediesel : People still need them. They're called cell phones.

[@strangeluck]

Was super excited to see how you disassemble this. I knew you could get in if you destroy the faceplate. I let out a cry of despair when you resorted to destroying the faceplate. Oh well. My HP's keys won't work unless I press on the faceplate between the display and the keys. It's a common malady apparently. Still love it. Wonder how much gold is in it. Does it beat Pentium chips?

[@channelsixtysix066]

Ben, you weren't meant to fix it. Instead, you just threw it away. I have the 48 GX and dread having to do this job one day. I'm determined to find a less destructive way, so the faceplate doesn't need to be destroyed. Your Louis Rossmann impression gave me the chuckles.

[@ADBBuild]

"Maybe it's time to end the video." :cut to black:

[@slother93]

My HP 48GX I purchased in 1992 for college is still in perfect working order. Still have all my programs from that era too! These weren’t that expensive, so I don’t think they were designed for repairability but rather to optimize the cost to make.

[@demonsty]

this is hard to watch after seeing ben easily tear apart ANY and EVERY thing he gets his hands on. the terminator joke was hilarious

[@sobertillnoon]

TIL: Canadia has a different definition of a gallon.

[@scottcol23]

yeah the Canadian gallon aka Imperial gallon is based off of a weight of 10 lbs of water. which comes out to 4.5 liters. where in the US it is based off of a volume of 231 Cubic Inches, or 3.7 liters.

[@olik136]

@@scottcol23 ...and then the US also has dry gallon... which is close to the Canadian gallon.. but not quiet...

[@scottcol23]

@@olik136 yeah its ridiculous really

[@kippie80]

What u talken about man, like the rest of the world, we are metric. Litres. Must have been a while since you been in Great White North.

[@sobertillnoon]

@@kippie80 I'm not talking about day to day usage of individuals. I'm talking about a unit of measure.

[@Lion_McLionhead]

They didn't want their technically savvy customers upgrading the SRAM. The lion kingdom eventually ripped off the tin, stacked on another 64kbyte SRAM with an $8 soldering iron & then had a 48GX for half price. It was an adventurous & ugly rework, but it worked for a few years until the display cracked in an unfortunate fall.

[@Turtle_1976]

Holy cow! I’ve never met anybody else that liked the arch deluxe! I loved that thing and I just thought about re-creating it myself the other day. Too funny!

[@drjmansplace5174]

The machine language is Saturn if memory serves correctly.

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

Zoom! Boing! I, Saturn -- BOING! You want slumber? Kay-o.

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

@@wesleyswafford2462 good to know someone saw where I was going with this

Saturn is actually the name of the 4 bits CPU.

[@brodriguez11000]

@ : Agreed. RPL is the language.

[@madeintexas3d442]

How much flux are you going to use? Ben: Yes

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

That was my calculator in high school. Everyone else had TI-81s, I had this beast. Sadly, it got lost with my luggage my senior year on a trip. My father-in-law was a high school science teacher, and also an HP / RPN head - using an HP 15C as his primary calculator up until he retired in 2008! He once had his calculator get stolen - then returned. Likely because the thief couldn't figure RPN out.

[@MattMcIrvin]

Once a thief stole my nice Sharp scientific calculator and left me this rotten TI in its place.

[@davidk8893]

Missing lines in the LCDs of the HP 48 calculators is a well known problem with a well known fix. The LCD panel makes contact with the rest of the circuitry with a rubber conductive strip that gets clamped to some gold plated pads on the PCB. Most likely cleaning this conductive strip would have fixed the calculator and made it just like new. There are tutorial documents online showing the process.

[@dragom3417]

As a Canadian..I love your Canadian Accent singing LOL

[@MikeStavola]

I swear that all graphing calculators from the 80s until now are made in the same sweatshop.

[@timothyreed7241]

When I was younger gas was around $1.79/gallon and the neighborhood gas stations (4 of them) had "Mad Mondays." On Monday you could get your first 10 gallons for only $1.00/gallon and everyone in town would top off. The 4 stations went under after 9/11 when gas prices spiked and they tried to make Mad Mondays $2.00/gallon and people stopped flocking on Mondays.

[@jondorthebrinkinator]

25:50 A related phenomenon: almost every apartment complex around here built before 2000ish deliberately skips 13. First building, 1-12; second building, 14-27. Every time

[@MikaelLevoniemi]

Eh you have different sets of floors in each building? How is that logical?

[@BenHeckHacks]

Most planes omit a 13th row of seats.

[@oldguy9051]

@@MikaelLevoniemi It's like reading multi-volume technical manuals where vol. 2 starts at page 500 or so.

[@MikaelLevoniemi]

@@oldguy9051 It's another book! It should begin with page 1! :D

[@oldguy9051]

@@MikaelLevoniemi Yes, it should. ;-)

[@jorgeszabo1659]

I have one of these sitting on my desk :) best calculator ever!

[@sedawk]

It is - I don't have it anymore and wish I could find one!

[@MrQuarts]

Haha, your impressions are so good!

[@GaiusIuliusCaesar1]

I had a 48G during the late 90s. The AP path math classes used them, the normal math classes used TI-82s. RPN takes awhile to get used to but is interesting stack way of doing things

[@brodriguez11000]

Kind of a natural way of doing it. Had a GX and EduCalc had some very nice stuff for it.

[@tallswede80]

you can do things with it that you can't do any other way, especially with the rpl programming and solver.

[@mr-meek]

I had jiminy christmas biscuits once... damn that was an intense trip

[@mr-meek]

Also, those plastic spoogers are great. Just don't forget to throw it in the dishwasher afterwards

[@jj74qformerlyjailbreak3]

In the 90s we didn’t have this Surveillance State We find ourselves in today. PS Matchbox 20 Matchbox = 86. 86-20= 66. Go Figure! They Couldn’t Pick Another Number. Symbolism Was Their Downfall. Besides the stuff they did under the protection of One Eye wasn’t ever supposed to be known. 🤮

[@FluffyTheGryphon]

This was the most painful disassembly video I've ever seen, hands down. A shocking number of odd design decisions. They were smoking some interesting stuff in those days.

[@my3dprintedlife]

You can't mention the printers without saying what you're printing. Otherwise I enjoyed the video.

[@olik136]

with your name I would have thought you can translate the g-code from sound of the stepper motors 😂

[@DeNifty1]

Just ordered new batteries for my HP-20S because of this video. I was quite happy with it dimly showing till this video

[@MattMcIrvin]

I never had mine for long enough for it to suffer any kind of technical malfunction--got stolen too soon. Sounds like I wasn't the only person with this experience. That blue-on-pea-soup display was kind of awful, and I was one of the few people who preferred the 28's clamshell case to this format (aside from the 28's disastrous battery door), but aside from that, this calculator was a beast, one of the all-time greats. I still love RPL. It has more in common with Forth and Lisp than with BASIC. But User RPL and System RPL were different dialects, the latter used for the built-in software with a lot of the guardrails removed. But, yeah, it's notoriously hard to repair.

[@hippynurd]

I used to work at HP where they make the calculators, and I know whats inside, and how its built, so I dont need to watch the video. Its heatstaked every centemeter, Even if you do get it open you wont get it back together, and none of that matters much because you wont lkely get that dispalay back on because you cant line up the zebra connector properly. or recrimp the holder... So... Im pretty sure this will only end in disaster... Those calculators are really really designed to never be repaired, but they are also really well designed to not need repairing. Typically the CPU part is tab bonded, and they usually dont have many other parts. They used really good caps that never fail and everything is coated in gold so it wont ever corrode. The amount of engineering in the calculators is amazing, albeit not very repairable.

[@darkgrey1790]

Ben is living his best life.

[@krzbrew]

Most likely, this calculator wasn't supposed to be repaired.

[@brodriguez11000]

Not intentionally. I had to send mine back to HP. I remember when they called me about it.

[@Yngdady]

Being born in '93, I enjoy the talk about what was cool in the 90s

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

9:51 -- James Rolfes favourite line

[@WhyDontYouBuildit]

Stupid elastomeric connectors were ALWAYS the cause of broken screens in all the electronic devices I naively tried to fix when I was a kid.

[@mrsid6581]

This calculator got me through school... still use RPN, it's so superior

[@PovlKvols]

I stil have mine, and I'm very amazed at how durable these machines actually were. I found mine years past the batteries end date. Replaced the batteries, and everything just worked. It had entered a deep sleep state, and that had apparently kept the static RAM alive for years.

[@chanelnumba_5]

Win big, mama's fallen goblin! Lose big, livin' out her lies… Wants it all, mama's fallen goblin! Lose it all, rollin' the dice of her life…

[@illustriouschin]

The beeping in the background sounds exactly like the hearing test they give us at work.

[@admirerofclassicalelectron2858]

Yes to right to repair. But there is no right to butcher it without any knowledge. Poor HP 48SX!

[@theofficialczex1708]

That George Carlin impression was top-notch.

[@jimbo1531]

Ah yes, I R transceiver. I R baboons more technologically advanced cousin.

[@kenrickman6697]

You mentioned the 3D printers making background noise, and a few minutes in I’d completely forgotten that. The sound sounds “computer-y” to me, because it reminds me so much of the days I spent with my dad at the old mainframe computer labs at NASA, listening to the tape drives and plotters and line printers. Thank you for that memory!

[@BenHeckHacks]

Unintentional but you're welcome!

[@JamesPotts]

HP briefly owned the "engineering" calculator market back then. Pretty much every engineering student on campus had an HP-28 or HP-48.

[@sjn7220]

Had that calculator in the early 90s, used it throughout college. Absolutely loved it and the reverse polish notation. Eventually had problems with the keypad and tried fixing it but taking it apart absolutely destroyed it kind of like what happened to you. Sold it on eBay for parts many years ago. 😔

[@Alphax45]

Please never stop the random songs Needs more Ben

[@John_Ridley]

It's difficult to repair. That's only a problem if they ever broke, which they didn't. TIs of the era were lucky to make it 6 months of heavy engineering use before croaking. By contrast most of my friends have HPs that they bought in the 80s and they still are working fine. I'm very sad that both of my HPs got lost in a move 25 years ago. Kinda thinking about buying a SwissMicro clone. You will notice that all that "janky" assembly - is still solid after decades.

[@BenHeckHacks]

That's a good point!

[@MattMcIrvin]

It seems like the common experience was that someone would steal the thing long before it ever broke down. They were just too valuable.

[@ChrisDreher]

TI-81... that calculator had a crippling flaw: the battery cover. It was made from a cheap flexible material. If the calculator fell of your school desk, the cover popped off and the batteries scittered across the floor. Since that calc had no backup battery and no upload/download ability, all saved data was lost. Whenever someone knocked a calc off their desk, the whole math class would gasp and groan in empathy.

[@uwezimmermann5427]

17:00 "this super high grade, made in Amerika..." honestly, the world outside the USA might never really have considered "Made in the USA" as a hallmark of quality. Listen to Marty... "all the best stuff is made in Japan". By the way the display in the calculator was made by Epson (Japan).

[@HoldFastFilms]

I grew up outside of US and I don't even remember even seeing anything made in the USA, let alone think that was a quality mark. Japan was definitely preferred over anything.

[@JWimpy]

Exercise! Oh, I thought you asked if I wanted extra fries.

[@josephroblesjr.8944]

“I guess this is the end of the video” 20 min left

[@jstro-hobbytech]

Its funny, as a Canadian I find all imitations of our accent sound like cast members from Fargo

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I was expecting Ben to gasp and shout "Oh my God its full of stars!" as he pulled back the rubber over the CPU.... :D

[@Decco6306]

"impressively bad engineering" wow just like a macbook

[@a.j.haverkamp4023]

I own one too. I still have the serial cable and 2 thick manuals. Quite expensive when I bought it around 1991. But I don’t have expansion modules.

[@CandGoods]

The talk of accidentally cutting oneself with Xacto knives is very relatable to me. I've got a scar on my left palm, roughly in-line with my thumb, from having had to get 7 stitches thanks to an Xacto.

[@R.B.]

Almost a decade ago I sliced my left thumb... I mostly caught that nerve you aren't supposed to cut. Some degraded feeling but not completely. 🤷 Oh well. Can't go backwards to prevent it now.

[@Kylefassbinderful]

The TI-85 and TI-86 had that "button under the screen" menu style. I haaaated those models lol. My favorite TI calc was the TI-89.

[@pageophile]

I had a HP 48GX, it was the model after the SX. Loved it and yes it was Stupid Expensive $$$ back in the day. Also not even vaguely serviceable as your video shows. The power button started to go on mine and you needed to press down from the backside when pressing it to work. RPN is a truly awesome way to work with numbers. You could also enter in equations as they were written, a game changer back then. Kinda miss having a super calculator but cell phones are so far advanced it's laughable now.

[@brodriguez11000]

Advanced yes. User interface, not so much.

[@weirdlooking]

Ben I'm two seconds in and your using two different battery brands! You monster!

[@Silver_Adventures]

don't have to change anything about Los Angeles to make it a city of goblins

[@disposablebasterd]

Don’t forget capitol critters! The only rats in dc you actually liked.

[@agenericaccount3935]

I appreciate that you did not acknowledge Windows ME.

[@rimmersbryggeri]

Actually in the movie "Michael " They did substitute angel for goblin.

[@melody3741]

Your commentary is on a whole other level.

[@timrichter1980]

There is unintentionally bad engineering and intentiontionally bad engineering. This one is the latter I guess... Or it was engineer Bob from shift 3 who designed the case for the "overengineered" pcb on his last days at HP

[@flymario8046]

OMG your Louis impression was so damned funny.