Casio FX-702P

This is a pocket calculator I had when I was in the high school.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Casio_FX-702P_Programmable_Calculator.png

I remember saving a lot of money and coins to buy it. I kept my money in an old malt can 'orzoro'.

Then I went to my dad and asked him to buy the calculator for me.

It was 1982 I guess. I was 16.

I enjoyed a lot programming it, and also has some correspondent around, and we were exchanging code. I remember testing a lot of sort algorithms to identify the best performer. Bubble sort, inserion sort, shell-metzner sort, quicksort.

I remember trying hard to understand quicksort.

I developed a game on it, along with my friend Marco Crosa. It was a kind of shooting game, but difficult to do something very dynamic on a single line of text display.

Then I was hacking it, and bought the printer too to print my programs. The printer was not able to print lower case letters, but I hacked the calculator and was able to find strange codes that corresponded, when printed, to the lowercase letters.

In the same period my friend Daniele Stella was hacking with the Hewlett Packard HP 41.




.

The computer I started with

Here I am going really back in my memories.
This is the computer I started with. It is an HP-97 programming calculator.
It was 1976. I was 10.

(see http://www.hpmuseum.org/ )

And I was fascinated by this incredible machine.

It was programmable, and it had an amazing 224 bytes of program memory to play with.
Memory was not permanent, and it was lost every time you powered off the calculator.

But it had a magnetic stripe mass memory. We were using small two-sided magnetic cards, each side was able to record 112 bytes. So passing the two sides of the card in the reader was allowing a complete save or load of the program memory.

What a time!