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The Calculating World with Wing and You

Memoir or Trivia?

Published 25 January 2008, 05:27 PM

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.

Posted By Wing Kin Cheung | 1 Comments | Trackbacks | Permalink
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Comments

Hello, Its good to see that HP Calculators have a blog but its sad that so few people seem to be using it. I hope this improves. I have owned HP calculators since 1972. Starting with an HP35, then an HP25, an HP41c, an HP48sx, HP49 and an HP49G+. In the early days HP calculators represented something very special. I recall the adverts that appeared in Scientific American showing the HP25c, the HP67 and HP97 and I recall the struggle between Texas Instruments and HP over the efficiency of RPN versus their algebraic approach but after the HP48 something changed and it is that change that I would like to comment on in the hope that HP may produce something special again. In the last few years there has been a lot of adverse comment on the HP49 keyboard with its lost keystrokes. There are three things that people notice in a calculator; the look and feel of the keyboard, the quality of the screen and the build quality. Tick those boxes and people will see an immediate differentiator with Texas or Casio. A second area is what can I interface this calculator to? The HP41 had an HP-IL interface, a printer, a wand and a number of add-in modules. It could be part of the world and I recall articles in HP Journal talking about remote data logging. The HP50G has an serial interface but it does not seem to connect to anything in the real world; I don't even think HP supplies a cable. If I was in school, university, a research lab or even a hobbyist looking for a cheap data gatherer/controller for an experimental or robot setup for example HP calculators don't offer that option anymore - Texas Instruments calculators do though. Recently I saw a the Microvision Pico Projector at CES 2008. I thought when I saw it that if such a device could be part of or an external module that could connected to an HP calculator that could allow a higher resolution 'virtual' display screen in a lab environment projected onto a wall or down onto a desk it could change the format of future calculators. Such innovative ideas could help allow HP to provide a 'Must Buy' calculator of the future. Imagine the layout; a keyboard and single line display, like the HP71, but with a plug in virtual screen option as described above. The larger size allowing interface cards to be plugged in.
# Friday, February 01, 2008 02:47 PM by davidhankey

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