I always enjoyed all the contest of trivia questions many of you like to put together to showcase your domain knowledge. Richard and Jake, two of our long term HP calculator loyalists, did the same. They put together some highlights of our calculators’ present and past for our CES tradeshow few weeks back. I thought it would be great to share them with you. Are you using your calculators for game playing while learning math as mentioned below?
HP Calculators: Past & Present
· The HP-12C calculator has been in continuous production longer than any other calculator, and it has been manufactured in more countries, all around the world, than any other calculator.
· High-end HP graphing calculators provide a customization capability (common on HP calculators for decades) that is not found on other calculators. Any program, function, operation, or complex application may be executed by a single key press at the discretion of the user. Even the key choice (shifted, etc.) is a user choice.
· A great source for accurate technical high-end HP calculator information is: http://www.hpcalc.org/
· The best source for older HP calculator information is: http://www.hpmuseum.org/. This is also an excellent source for photos, manuals, and user community “chatter.”
· The HP 48 series has one popular Usenet newsgroup: comp.sys.hp48 which is the best place on the Internet for technical discussions about HP calculators – especially most high-end programmable models.
· The HP 50g runs on an ARM processor which may be programmed directly in ARM code to run extremely fast and perform computational feats that only a large computer could do just a few years ago.
· RPL (used on high-end HP models) is a more advanced form of RPN making it the most efficient user interface ever devised for a calculator.
· Game playing is the most important aspect for the average student for a calculator. School, teacher, and parent considerations usually prevail.
· Calculators co-exist with palmtops, laptops, PDA’s, and cell phones as a billion plus dollar business because they are still the most effective and low cost way of solving mathematical problems
· Battery life is nearly impossible to calculate for modern calculators because they digitally turn on and off various portions of the circuits being used at millisecond speeds. Unless you specify the exact conditions, any measured current drain value will be wrong and not useable to estimate battery life. This is typical of most modern microprocessor based products.
· One of the mathematical problem types yet to be solved by a calculator is one that solves compact tensor notation problems. Further advances in graphing, symbolic math, and algometry will probably occur before advanced math compact tensor notation will be seen on a calculator.
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