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HP-65 and friends
(feddit.uk)
A community centered around handheld calculators. Show off your collections, ask questions, or trade benchmarks and torture tests.
Icon snagged from here.
That's a whole line of pretty calculators there! Is the magnetic reader on the top of the unit?
No, there was a small slot that you would feed the magnetic card into from left to right. It had a little motor that would pull it through. I still have mine somewhere.
I'll have to see if there's a deep dive on that somewhere. It sounds fascinating!
I actually had the TI-59. I remember I entered a program where you are trying to avoid a missile running on vectors and a mine that was teleporting around on a Cartesian grid, and saved that on one of the magnetic strips. And also programmed the quadratic equation on a magnetic card. It had a base it could attach to that provided power and had a thermal printer strip. That calculator also had a place to put a pre-programmed chip into it. I think I had casino games or something.
If you're wondering how I had all that in high school, well that was what my dad thought would buy my affection when he left my mom for the secretary... Didn't work, but I got a piece of cutting edge hardware for it.