The TI-82, TI-83, and many other graphing calculators made by Texas Instruments, Casio, and Hewlett Packard, sported large square screens out of necessity to accommodate the graphing functionality. As a side benefit, this provided room for arithmetic expressions in a multi-line input.
Multi-line inputs are particularly useful for viewing the history - the last few lines of expressions and values. With this visual feedback, it was much easier to reference the answer to the last expression, as well as the expressions themselves (seeing the latest assignment of values to variables, reusing parts of the last expression, etc.) This was much better than a single or dual memory slot under the MEM/recall approach on most typical calculators. And working with single lines (or at most, dual lines on scientific calculators) was like performing computations through blinders.
The graphing calculator was a godsend.
What vexed me was why I could only enjoy this in the tangible world. Personal computers are even far more powerful computational devices, and yet, bundled calculators on just about every operating system mimicked the feel of the real world (that's fine), but chose the limited calculators as their models (not good). As a result, they were a pain to use for anything more than a single calculation.
They were workarounds across the years - spreadsheet programs like Excel, full-blown software like MATLAB and Mathematica, online search bar calculators like Google's, offline search bar calculators like Spotlight in Mac OS X - but none of these quite fit the use case.
It had me scrambling for third party calculators, none of which were remotely famous in the mainstream and therefore niches that most people couldn't enjoy. The Power Calculator from the Windows XP PowerToys was my first good find. SpeedCrunch was the my first find for other platforms, if you don't count the partially usable paper tape feature for history on Calculator.app in Mac OS X.
But the first one that truly comes close something light and powerful like the TI-8x series was Soulver for Mac OS X.
Like those aforementioned graphing calculators, this provides the multi-line input to display all variables set, expressions written, and answer values resulting. There are plenty of other useful things it can perform on these beyond the physical limitations of those calculators, ranging from referring to more than one stored answer value (ANS on the TI) with its ability to reference any line, to going into previous lines and editing.
It is well-suited to perform the tasks without the extra weight of larger applications that would be overkill for this situation.
This is how I believe a standard calculator application should be done in personal computing. We could still strive to implement visual and interactive elements for the real-world analogy, but if they keep in mind the advantages in usability a computer can offer over the physical calculators, we can have the best of both worlds.
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