Casio CFX-9850G

A late 1990s graphical calculator, I bought this when I wanted to see how things had moved on from the original Casio graphical calculator. It is more powerful, a full 32KB of memory, and has a lot more functions. It even had a PC connect mode, but despite all that it feels a little underpowered even for back then.

It does have nice keys, display and I can remember my sister preferring to use it because you could see the calculation you were doing. More interestingly it ran on triple A batteries so no expensive replacements.

Found at:

www.caffnib.co.uk/calculators/calculators.html

Tour de France 2012

I am not a big cycling fan, but with history in the making I decide to watch the final state 20 that ends up in Paris. So Cavendish won, with Bradley Wiggins setting up his final sprint. It is clearly a really technical precisely timed event, the break away which had 20 seconds at one stage was reeled in in the final 5km.

A nice piece of history a British 1-2, whereas we've only finished at best 4th. Cycling seems to be resurgent and it was an interesting thing to watch unfold.

Casio FX-992

This was a calculator I bought after my degree and used for a few years. My first solar power/battery powered one. It had a supposedly more intuitive input system, where you could enter the function key before the number you wanted to apply. It took a while to get used to from the previous models.

Found at:

http://www.calculator.org/Pages/calculator.aspx?model=fx-992s&make=Casio

The Flashing Blade

For some reason I thought back to my summer holidays when I was growing up. For a couple of years there seemed to be re-runs of a French imported series called The Flashing Blade. It was an epic series on horseback it seemed, so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flashing_Blade

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-ZEDNkZ2L4

Casio FX 7000GA

For my A levels, in the first year I bought a graphic calculator. The college I was attending was getting a bulk order and I bought through that, I seem to remember it was about £30 but I might be wrong. So this is where graphic calculators began, it was a pretty neat machine, with a simple programming language too. Any exam would first involve writing a quadratic solver for use in problems! Programmables were allowed in the exam, as long as they had been "reset" before the exam started. I remember my A-level this procedure was done, but they did not press the reset button properly.

Found at:

http://www.voidware.com/calcs/fx7000g.htm

Casio FX 100C

For my secondary school exams I got a new calculator and used the FX 570 as a spare. I don't remember it being more capable than that, and it was back to a more chunky design. I seem to remember at the time that it would better to go back to a simple AA battery.

Found at:

http://www.calculator.org/Pages/calculator.aspx?model=fx-100C&make=Casio

Casio FX-570

My second scientific calculator, lasted my from about third to fifth year at school. It fell apart as I remember, but it was a neat calculator including fractions, constants, and base conversions

Found at:

http://www.voidware.com/calcs/fx570.htm