The SR-50 measured 5-3/4 inches long by 3-1/8 inches wide by 1-3/16 inches high (147 mm by 78 mm by 31 mm) and was powered by a rechargeable
NiCad battery pack, built from three welded AA cells. It had 40 keys, and flat sliding switches for
degrees/
radians and on/off. "SR" stood for "
slide rule." The SR-50 had a red
LED display with a signed ten-digit mantissa plus a signed two-digit exponent for
floating point numbers (negative values were indicated with a leading minus sign and positive values with no sign). Internally, calculations were performed with a 13-digit
mantissa, providing much greater calculation accuracy than the 10-digit precision of most scientific calculators of the time. After the leading sign, digits consisted of a
seven-segment display plus decimal point. A blinking display indicated an error, such as a calculation error or an overflow or underflow condition. Like most scientific calculators, the SR-50 mostly used ordinary
infix notation, as opposed to the postfix
Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) employed by its main competitor, the Hewlett Packard HP-35. The SR-50 followed the standard order of operations by performing unary (single-argument) operations (reciprocal, square, square root, log, trig and hyperbolic trig functions) immediately, and multiplication, division, root, and power operations before addition and subtraction operations. But: you had to enter parameters first when using single-argument operations (e. g. 30 sin). As an example, the keypresses to calculate "3 * log(4) + 5" was entered almost as written, namely "3 * 4 log + 5 =". This is because the calculator would execute the log function before performing the multiplication operation, and complete the multiplication operation before executing the addition operation. It did so by having unary operations operate on the X register, addition and subtraction operate on the X and Z registers, and multiplication, division, power, and root functions operate on the X and Y registers in its operational stack. An unusual feature of the SR-50 was that its included functions such as
factorial and
hyperbolic trig functions, which were found on very few calculators (including the HP-35 and
HP-45) at the time. The user invoked the hyperbolic functions by entering the function argument and then pressing the "hyp" key, followed by the "sin", "cos", or "tan" function key. The
inverse hyperbolic functions were accessed by first pressing the "arc" and "hyp" keys (in any order) and then pressing the "sin", "cos", or "tan" key. Hyperbolic trig arguments were always assumed to be in radians regardless of the setting of the degree/radian (D/R) mode switch. In addition to its three-register operational stack, consisting of X, Y, and Z registers, the SR-50 also included one memory (M) register to which the value in the X (display) register could be directly added using the "summation" key. The SR-50 had very fast trig functions (about half a second to evaluate each function) and was a popular calculator to use in contests involving pocket calculators. == Technical data ==