I find this amusing! I looked up to see what could possibly be your old school days, and then I think of the undoubted and high intellect of Heather and her unintended window dancing, and no doubt she would recall these too. And she like you is smart, and probably knew the hillbillies number thing which did not occur to me. So that part was lost on me till I thought about it. And NC has some beautiful country, and the highest mountain east of the Mississippi and has enough hills for hillbillies and that is the only illogical chain of steps that got me to the New York transplant and you and the calculator hillbillies. Heck. We heard about hillbillies in Colorado, where I grew up, and we knew they were from back east somewhere like the Carolinas or the West Virginies or Tennessee or Kentucky. But hillbillies on a calculator is darned good. It made me think of how we kids communicated such things back then. When I was a lot younger "kid" than now. . . so I'll tell you how we did it. and, well, Okay. Things change. You and she and the numbers on a calculator used to communicate are quite inventive. We had to USE PAPER and pencils, since BIC's did not yet exist. . . .and you know, we would tear a sheet of paper into a smaller piece just big enough for our note's words and save the torn paper for other notes. If it was a secret message, or we did not want others to easily read it, we would write in a transposition code. As others got good at transpositions we went back to code sheets, and double transpositions, which for us were inverse frequency tables. Usually though, being stuck using only one language was a stumbling bloc. Some of my group used Spanish/Mexican slang and that worked until the other sides smart girls figured it out. (we had smart girls and they had smarter girls) It was tough. But back to your calculator. Those would be easy to erase and have all sorts of advantages over paper-pencil notes which were damning hard evidence if someone recognized your writing, which happened with mine all the time. (I still scrawl, terribly, print okay) But the biggest thing about the calculators . . .back then when I was a kid, was: they did not yet exist. Color television did not exist--but was a coming thing. Even when I was of legal drinking age, few people had color TV -- and most of them complained they loved it but most of the time they had to fiddle with the green or red faces. In fact only a few programs were broadcast in color. NBC adopted the peacock with the flared of its tail to broadcast prior to feeding you color! Calculators. Okay. The first one I saw was a colleague's engineering 16 digit 4 function (+,-,x,/) Sharp, he had paid over $400 for, and when you did a 16 digit calculation, you had to press a button to see the rest of your number since only 8 digits were on the display. But it beat the heck out of a slip-stick or circular (wheel) slide-rule. It also spelled the end of K&E (Kueffel and Esser) slide-rules. (I had and used a log log decitrig rule that was accurate enough to guess the 4th digit if you had good eyes...the scales were good enough made like a vernier type of rule.) My first real calculator was a TI SR51A that did decimal to trig and had a mess of functions, and would rough out 69! sixty-nine factorial. But not 70! Permutations and combinations were some things I had interest in. But it took me only seconds to recognize 7734 when I saw it on a display. When you hillbillies and youngsters are old kids like me, what do you reckon the kids will talk about that was a general well known art of the day, myspace, or youtube or javascripting or Windows KillBill, or XP, Linux or HTML, XTML or will anyone but scientists know what a logarithm is and why we use them. And you all know that Kasner's term for 10^100 was googol, and this was a number larger than the number of elementary particles in the universe. I thought Google was a good name immediately. I knew what a googol was also, before there were calculators. . . Hey, Windows KillBill IV would be a good name for his new or last operating system... I wonder what you will most recall about this era when and if you 'kids' get old...er? I am worried still about becoming too mature... or even acting too maturely...I know I'll grow up some day, and lose all the hints of magic in everything. . .