You can still get new HPs that do RPN. My employer got me one last year that I've decimated. So they bought me a new one this year - a casio that doesn't do RPN.

RPN's nice for the programmer. In fact, when you've got an expression in infix notation (that's the normal, mathematical notation), it can be convenient to immediately convert it to postfix (rpn). You can very easily evaluate a postfix expression with two (or even one) stacks using maybe a few dozen lines of code. I always found it irritating as a user, but back in the day there weren't a lot of options.

I recall when I was in 8th grade my teacher (Mrs Rich) told us that when we went to college, we'd need to have $300 calculators. She couldn't have known that we would have much more powerful calculators at a fraction of the cost.

k