Your memory serves you well. I was a bit of a calculator nerd. The Physics lab in Uni had a few Olivetti calculating machines . We were required to use them for calculations on Brownian motion , tables upon tables of displacement values, sums of squares etc . These mechanical wonders could do sums, averages Squares and I think sq roots.. then there was a fancier HP 98*** , which was silent, . I purchased a Commodore SR 4190 when I was doing a Masters , which had more buttons than Bermingham., ..and could do all the statistical stuff .. factorials, Combinations and Permutations and kind of integration..most of which I never needed. Finally I mainlined on a Texas TI59 fully programmable calculator. ..which I still have. By that stage I was working in industry, and while I did purchase my own model, I blagged the Engineering department of my company to buy another with printing accessory, on the understanding that I would write the boss a program to calculate the winners of yacht races . It is something you might know more about, but offshore races were handicapped and a bigger faster boat might lose to a smaller slower class, . Remember this was 1977 and the Commodore PET was still a year away.. anyway it worked and I got access to the printer weeknights. I had set up an numerical integration which took about 8 hours to run , so I could get 2 data points for a graph each day for my thesis over 6 months.
The TI 59 is still my goto calculator, although it is now as a freebie on this tablet and on my mobile phone. The real calculator is upstairs, and still works , except of course the built in programming magnetic card reader has jellified drive wheels.
