I had bought a K+E slide rule, a fancy one, for taking physical science in HS in 1972. It could do logs, trig, etc. and had a fancy leather case. I don't recall ever using it for schoolwork, because soon after getting the SR and starting class, some of the students had some early calculators, including perhaps the HP-35. Well, that was way out of my price range, but my folks did get a 4-function Brother calculator, which was about the size and weight of a brick. I forget the price of the Brother, but it was cheaper than the HP.
Later, when I started chemistry about two years later, the Brother was hopelessly outdated, so I got a TI SR-50 scientific calculator, which cost about $150 IIRC. Not as cool perhaps as an HP, but it could hold its own.
The big news came in my senior year at HS when I was taking physics. One of my classmates, whose father was a petroleum engineer, traded in his HP-45 on the then brand-new HP-65 programmable, which then cost a whopping $795 retail (In those days, a new compact car had a base price of about $3500.) My father had retired from NASA by that time, and the Marshall SFC in Huntsville was offering HP-65s at a slight discount.
My folks snatched one up for me, but when I got the HP-65 and started using it, the display crapped out after a couple days, so I had to send it right back to HP to be fixed. I finally got it back later that summer, and it worked pretty much flawlessly, but I back slid to the old TI SR-50, which I used at college.
The HP-65 did have a neat plastic clam-shell carrying case, into which one could put the calculator, the charger, and a few of the magnetic cards which could be used to store programs for the calculator to load and execute.