I just ran across this channel yesterday, and have been binge watching the videos that you have posted. I really enjoy your presentation style, and find the subject matter fascinating.
Wonderful!!! I still have a similar one like this from 1986 working. Thanks to the FX -702 P CASIO that I bought with my girlfriend , now my wife, I was so glad that I gave her our first kiss. Painfully, with 400% inflation in Argentina now we can not even but the three c2032 batteries, one for the 2K memories. Than you. Cheers from Patagonia
Nice video! Interesting that Casio waffled back and forth between this BASIC and their proprietary, similar language in the later fx-4000p, for instance, yet the rest of the program modes/steps stayed the same. I find BASIC's line numbers clumsier than self-defined labels, in the latter, so maybe there was some internal debate along those lines, i.e., why BASIC for a hand-held calculator?
Yes I guess they wanted the calculator BASIC to be more compact so they took out line numbers and all the keywords. I agree about line numbers, I suspect they were more there to make program editing and debugging easier to implement, but they caused a lot of headaches when you wanted to reorganise a program. Now we have python on calculators which is a much better language theoretically but I wonder if used as much due to its lack of compactness.
Something similar happened with HP's early desktop calculators--they released some BASIC-programmable machines, but they also had a proprietary BASIC-like language called HPL. (Not the last proprietary language they'd invent, by any means.)
Again a very nice video! Though what's up with the "Sharp has no hyperbolic functions" mentioned twice in the video? Felt a bit out of place and not very relevant in the presentation. Just FYI. Sharps have other features that the Casio's don't have. Those features I often find more useful in BASIC than hyperbolic functions: labeled lines with GOTO/GOSUB, computed GOTOs and RESTORE, DATA with expressions, AREAD with DEF key to define functions with keys, DIM and ERASE in later models (no need for awful DEFM) to name a few. It depends on what we got used to as a non-standard BASIC dialect I suppose.
Yeah it may not have been clear I was just talking about how the 702p compared to the Sharp pc-1210 and 1211 that came out the previous year. I thought the slightly different positioning, closer to a scientific calculator, was interesting. Definitely was not talking about Sharp pocket computers in general - they went to different directions after 1981.
@@CalculatorCulture yes, that's true and I agree. The PC-1211 is branded as a computer, not a calculator. The later 1400 series is more calculator-like with calculator keys than PC-like such as the 12xx and 13xx series,. Early machines had to make compromises with limited ROM space of a few KB. It is quite an engineering feat to fit all that functionality in a few KB (20KB~40KB for early machines). The engineering and Sharp ROM dumps are interesting and list ROM call addresses to write machine code. Matrix operations can be done in BASIC with CALLs to PC-1403 (EL-5500III) ROM addresses. How cool is that?
I just ran across this channel yesterday, and have been binge watching the videos that you have posted. I really enjoy your presentation style, and find the subject matter fascinating.
Thanks for the kind words. 🙏
Wonderful!!! I still have a similar one like this
from 1986 working. Thanks to the FX -702 P
CASIO that I bought with my girlfriend , now my wife, I was so glad that I gave her our first kiss. Painfully, with 400% inflation in Argentina now we can not even but the three c2032 batteries, one for the 2K memories. Than you. Cheers from Patagonia
Thanks that’s a wonderful story!
@@CalculatorCulture Thanks to you!!!
Mine still works just fine.
Yeah that is one thing I forgot to mention, like most Casio devices, they seem to be fairly reliable.
Great video. I still have a Sharp PC-1401 that I use once in a while.
Beautiful machine! ❤ Thank you.
It was a superb success.
Nice video! Interesting that Casio waffled back and forth between this BASIC and their proprietary, similar language in the later fx-4000p, for instance, yet the rest of the program modes/steps stayed the same. I find BASIC's line numbers clumsier than self-defined labels, in the latter, so maybe there was some internal debate along those lines, i.e., why BASIC for a hand-held calculator?
Yes I guess they wanted the calculator BASIC to be more compact so they took out line numbers and all the keywords. I agree about line numbers, I suspect they were more there to make program editing and debugging easier to implement, but they caused a lot of headaches when you wanted to reorganise a program. Now we have python on calculators which is a much better language theoretically but I wonder if used as much due to its lack of compactness.
Something similar happened with HP's early desktop calculators--they released some BASIC-programmable machines, but they also had a proprietary BASIC-like language called HPL. (Not the last proprietary language they'd invent, by any means.)
Again a very nice video! Though what's up with the "Sharp has no hyperbolic functions" mentioned twice in the video? Felt a bit out of place and not very relevant in the presentation. Just FYI. Sharps have other features that the Casio's don't have. Those features I often find more useful in BASIC than hyperbolic functions: labeled lines with GOTO/GOSUB, computed GOTOs and RESTORE, DATA with expressions, AREAD with DEF key to define functions with keys, DIM and ERASE in later models (no need for awful DEFM) to name a few. It depends on what we got used to as a non-standard BASIC dialect I suppose.
Yeah it may not have been clear I was just talking about how the 702p compared to the Sharp pc-1210 and 1211 that came out the previous year. I thought the slightly different positioning, closer to a scientific calculator, was interesting. Definitely was not talking about Sharp pocket computers in general - they went to different directions after 1981.
@@CalculatorCulture yes, that's true and I agree. The PC-1211 is branded as a computer, not a calculator. The later 1400 series is more calculator-like with calculator keys than PC-like such as the 12xx and 13xx series,. Early machines had to make compromises with limited ROM space of a few KB. It is quite an engineering feat to fit all that functionality in a few KB (20KB~40KB for early machines). The engineering and Sharp ROM dumps are interesting and list ROM call addresses to write machine code. Matrix operations can be done in BASIC with CALLs to PC-1403 (EL-5500III) ROM addresses. How cool is that?