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.
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.
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.
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
But worth every dollar. This calculator had functions that weren't available anywhere else, like integration, solving equations. Wolfram Alpha wasn't there yet...
Today, a $700 laptop would make it look... Like a toy. While you could use this for engineering today, I really just wouldn't and it probably is why my dad's is still in a box in the garage.
Industrial tech is always so amazing to see. Like we all lament planned obsolescence but it doesn’t hit home until you see what the same manufacturers are capable of when targeting enterprise users. I’ve got a couple PDAs that are built so rock solid that I literally ran over one and it works just fine. When I start making money again I’ll probably end up buying a Toughbook because I’m sick of how flimsy even the best consumer laptops are. This stuff is always worth every penny if you can afford it.
I miss grunge, buckling spring keyboards, easy software piracy, Babylon 5, newsgroups, and badass vampires that didn't glitter, mostly Underworld and Vampire: The Masquerade.
I had one of those as a kid. I was an RPL maniac. I grew up to be a rocket scientist. Someone stole it from me at the university, I still wish every misfortune and calamity on whoever stole it.
My 48gx lcd failed so I decided to look under the hood. I completely destroyed that calculator and then found this video about 20 minutes later. I feel better now. Thanks!
I just realized, you could be doing literally anything and it would barely change how great your videos are. You could be making a salad and it would only be mildly less interesting.
I stil have mine, and I'm very amazed at how durable these machines actually were. I found mine years past the batteries end date. Replaced the batteries, and everything just worked. It had entered a deep sleep state, and that had apparently kept the static RAM alive for years.
Didn’t know anything about Electronics. Watched your widows and got inspired. Just repaired a circuit board on our stove. Spend 2$ on a new relay instead of $189 on a new board. Thanks Ben
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!!
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!
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.
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 ... :/
haha, great Rossmann -impression. Always cracks me up if youtubers I watch imitate one another! ;) thanks for the laugh. again HAHA, hearing "Dave Jones" sing was an absolute joy too... hehe ;-)
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.
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.
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!
@@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.
@@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!
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
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.
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!
@@BenHeckHacks Hey BEN HECK ,tell us the truth ,,,you would have enjoyed making a 3do into a handheld way more than this "Calculator Repair", oh if only you had that time back ,,,am I right ,,,??
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
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. 😔
Dude. Carrying the goblin joke over weeks of filming was beautiful. I busted out laughing when Goblin of the Morning came up. I then had to explain everything to my wife.
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.
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.
"What else happened in the 90's?" FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIRE, BEN! XD That watch though, man, you had far more patience taking it apart than I ever would have. The HP Calc, I'm surprised someone hasn't made a teardown redesign where it can give you exact locations where to drill through the casing to drill out the plastic rivets so you could then turn around and create some resin screwpoints so you could *make* it easily unscrewable. Shame about that LCD, though.
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
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.
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.
Oh god, I remember SmartKeys! Learning SysRPL was a great adventure. It was a definite feather in the cap having a full programming environment on the device.
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.
I still have mine. On of the best calicalators ever made. Now, I've got virtual digital copy on my smartphone that works exactly like the original. I love reverse polish notation, which works the same way as using a pencil and paper. Plus, there's also a stack just like the old printing calculators so you can see a list of what you've enteted.
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.
Made in corvallis Oregon There are HP Lab articles from the time that describe the internal hardware design. They were designed to be bullet proof. These were designed by instrument designers. And yes the traces are gold
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.
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.
...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.
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?
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.
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.
That thing was built to last forever, I have a HP 48G version since 1995 and still work, a month ago when I discovered the LCD screen turned black in the middle, but still turn on and work perfectly.
The PCB with all the golden lines looks amazing. Piece of art. I would place the thing landscape against a green background and inside a small golden frame, and would hang it on my wall.
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).
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.
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.
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.
my father is a land surveyor and this was the device we used to control the total station and collect the data (referred to as the data collector). If memory serves, it had custom software with it's own custom overlay that snapped into the indented section over the keys (excluding the function keys up top). the top 4 pin connector connected to a black serial cable that had a round connector which connected to the total station to remotely control it. the same plug was used with a different cable that had a serial connector on the other end for dumping the data over a com port. it was actually miserable to use considering this was circa 2005, far superior tools existed that did the same thing.
I had one those HP48's and they feel like a solid brick in your hand, two shot molded buttons that should never wear out...just a magnificent machine. I wondered if they potted them inside to feel so solid, but didn't dare get too curious trying to pry it apart. So today I have learned HP used hundreds of one time use plastic post melt rivets instead to make it feel so solid and robust. Just to be disposable..... the world is cruel.
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.
I have an HP48 SX in incredible condition. One of my favorite calculators. Unfortunately, most they keys don't work unless you push the bottom part of the screen down. These calculators are probably some of the best made. It unfortunate that HP has not re-released them like they have with some other models. What I find funny is people buy broken ones. You can't take them apart without damaging them so I have no idea what they do with them as parts.
I just want to point out that based off the way this is edited, and what Ben mentioned about coming back to his project a month later, his Angel/Goblin joked spanned at least a month. That's some dedication.
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.
One thing about the 90s was definitely a lot more RadioShack store around and Kmart was actually a thing. Usually when I think of the 90s I'm instantly reminded of the noise that dialup fax modems made and windows 95 startup shutdown was music. Being in elementary school learning how play Oregon trail on Macintosh Lc ll plus. I definitely remember fastfood was cheaper. I also remember when McDonald's had Nintendo 64 in the play place. Course Burger King cartoon kids they to used have as advertised mascot instead of the king guy. Course McDonald's using styrofoam containers for the burgers instead of cardboard. What definitely is surprise is seeing video of people who have a really cheeseburger from fastfood and how it like never ages.
I still have my HP 48G from back then. Sadly, made in Singapore, not USA. Also have my old TI-83+SE. Batteries have been removed to avoid leakage, but I do add the batteries and power them both up now and again.
