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Kids today, they wouldn't believe you
Magnetic strip reader and writer, 7-segment LED screen, hardware sliding switch from user mode to programming mode.
I spent hours upon hours with that thing. My brother or father had stored a moon landing game on one of the writable magnetic strips. You entered impulse corrections and got numbers for the distance to the moon surface. If you crashed the screen blinked with all ones.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-65#/mβ¦
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-65#/media/File:HP_65.jpg
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I'm curious how well both the calculator and the strips have aged.
I wouldn't be surprised if the strips still work, as the information density probably wasn't pushing any boundaries.
The 1974 calculator was still working well in the 90s, so why not another 20 years?
I think my dad said the power supply was having issues, but I would guess the calculator would still be fine if you could power it.
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See those A--E buttons? Those are the programmable buttons -- they will call into a program you stored in memory. The slot you see on the left side of the box is the mouth of the strip reader. You feed it the strip and it reels it in with a whirring sound and then spits it out from the equivalent opening on the other side of the box.
The strip then slides neatly into the space above the A--E buttons. You gently push it through a third opening just below the right-hand upper edge of the box -- you may see a hint of the opening just to the right of the x<>y imprint above the E button. This way you can replace the pre-printed functions with your names for the reprogrammed functionality.
It came with a booklet of read-only magnetic strips with various applications for e.g. statistics, finance or physics, and a bunch of writable strips for your personal use.