I would say that I saw plenty of users in the UK and Germany, no experience with the Far East myself With America being a key market for HP and RPN, when will the the new 17BII+'s and 10BII's become available here?

I know I tackled RPN only because after many years I finally acquired an HP calc which I had craved for a long time. Since Polish Notation was a European convention I would have assumed that it was more of a European phenomenon. I can say that once you understand RPN you tend to favor it and stick with it.

I'm from France and I've learned RPN at the age of 15 when our math teacher introduced us to the hp 25 calculator. Since then I've used both RPN and algebraic calculators but I've bought only hp RPN calculators. ----------- I prefer using RPN over algebraic, but it's difficult to explain exactly why. I've seen passionnate discussions on RPN vs Algebraic but in my case I think my preference comes from a mix of true RPN advantages for calculations (once you know RPN it's elegant and efficient for long formulas), and more subjective items such as "elite" factor associated to RPN ("not used by everybody") and the attractiveness of the hp calculators (at least the old ones): build quality, keyboard feeling, design... making them highly desirable items to own. ----------- I've a dead 41C that I would like to get repaired, plus working 11C, 32s & 48GX. ----------- I've just got a new hp 35s which looks like a great calculator with most of the values associated to the old hp calulators (it looks and feels as a quality item with a nice design - I need to look to the detailed features now...). ----------- Btw I'm surprised that the hp 35s user manual is not available as a pdf download. The link to it on hp web shows nothing: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/manualCategory?product=3442987&lc=en&cc=us

Please reintroduce the 11c/15c. The 11C has to be the best all-around rpn calculator ever designed. This fifty year old would purchase two the minute they were available. The new HP(s) calculators are not practical in their design, also they look like the cheap TIs and Sharps of the early 1990's. I own a 12C, a 20S, a 35s and a 41C. I probably won't buy another calculator in my life because I need one. I will however buy two of the one that I want .... the 11C.

Interesting conversation thread. I live in the UK. I'm 47, and run a small software engineering company. I was introduced to RPN (like the french chap above) by a college prof who at tech college showed us his brand new HP32E way back in 78. For some reason I loved the fact that it had no equals sign and also adored the quality of the feel. I bought one that week, and still use it today. That said, I do have a long history with HP calculators, having owned the HP32E along with a HP41CV, HP48GX (which I used all the way through an hons degree as an adult), HP32SII, HP49G+, HP50 and I've just bought a lovely HP35S - which (as the French chap says) works well, because HP finally sorted out the quality of the keyboard. The 49G+ was totally unusable because the keyboard missed keystrokes, and was a major annoyance when I started using it in earnest. I'd love to see a HP35S with red LED's - well... it would at least please this engineer even if the batteries only lasted a bare 8 hours). I own a HP29C as well. But why RPN? To me, I think my love of RPN is something to do with its simple elegance. The idea of being forced to add brackets to make a chain calculation work on an algebraic calc is both complex and difficult to use. The fact that you can't see intermediate results without trying to store them in memory is a real disadvantage because it prevents you checking your calculation as it proceeds. Simple features that are natural to RPN like swap X,Y just really have no direct corresponding feature in the other type of calc - and some of it comes down to the way I think - which can oddly be a bit machine like. Put it this way, if you're used to assembly programming, then stack based RPN makes a very elegant kind of sense. It wasn't long after I started using my HP32E calculator that I realised I found it very difficult to borrow a standard algebraic and make it work. I still feel the same to this day, nearly 30 years on, and wouldn't ever get rid of my HP's.