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The early history of HP calculators

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Re: The early history of HP calculators

#11

Post by agumonkey »

gaius wrote: post #2

Still got and use my 12C, and 48gx, unfortunately sold my 28 to buy the latter. When you look at the quality of what HP used to produce versus now, it's very sad.

Yeah they decided it wasn't worth their time, probably because the market shrunk. They could have made money on the education market because their RPN is a wonderful thing but it would require to explain things to kids and teachers .. so now it's all built by another company.

I sniped a 48SX on a Craigslist equivalent for 20$, the guy even sold the full manual and 3 math/asm books, I couldn't resist.

I'm learning electronics, I plan to mod it if I can, maybe an ESP8266 "coprocessor", a rechargeable lithium bat. and a usb port.

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#12

Post by ece »

userbinator wrote: post #6

Notice the distinct lack of an '=' button --- HP's calculators have been almost exclusively RPN-based. It's funny to watch other (newer) developers reactions when they ask to borrow the calculator that's usually on my desk (a 42S) and then give it back several minutes later, with a puzzled look on their faces.

A 42S that a high school friend had was how I first learned about RPN and HP calculators. Bought a 48G soon after which I still have. I use the prime app on android now which works well when needed.

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#13

Post by agumonkey »

userbinator wrote: post #6

Notice the distinct lack of an '=' button --- HP's calculators have been almost exclusively RPN-based. It's funny to watch other (newer) developers reactions when they ask to borrow the calculator that's usually on my desk (a 42S) and then give it back several minutes later, with a puzzled look on their faces.

"you've been stacked"

-- HP calc owner

Last year I finally read the whole manual (as a teen I only used the symbolic differentiator, most useful and magical to my brain at the time). Since I learned about Lisp, so RPN programming features appealed to me. I realized that:

1) RPN has lambda > means (lambda (...) (+ 2 ...))

2) RPN has a short syntax for them a 2 + >>

Yes, 1990 HP RPN had arrow notation out of the box. Take that ES6 !

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#14

Post by jaclaz »

Probably I will sound like a dinosaur, but I actually remember a time where the HP-97 was a daily used tool at work.

256 steps of program!

I could write small programs that calculated coordinates for road topography, circular curves and even (with a very little approximation) clothoids.

And you will have to pry out from my cold, dead hands my HP 28C[0][1], I bought it right when it came out in 1987 (yes, that is exactly 30 years ago) and it still goes strong.

But to give you a data point, I payed for it (in 1987) around 650,000 Lire, something like the equivalent to 330 Euro that nowadays would be roughly 750 Euro.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28_series

[1] http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#15

Post by tzs »

I never personally saw this, but I've been told by people that the HP-41 could be massively overclocked at the cost of heavy loss of battery life. Supposedly they could be overclocked sufficiently to handily beat common minicomputers, such as the PDP-11, at floating point.

Allegedly some people hacked interfaces between their PDP-11 and their overclocked HP-41 that allowed the PDP-11 to use the calculator as a floating point coprocessor.

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#16

Post by dm319 »

Getting good condition HP calculators can be quite expensive second hand. People interested in buying a new one should check out swissmicros [1]. They are bringing out an HP42s clone with quad precision decimal accuracy, which I'm looking forward to! [2]

[1] http://www.swissmicros.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LatjXPgLI8

EDIT: I don't have any involvement with swissmicros apart from anticipating their new calculator

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#18

Post by wslh »

I just bought a new HP 12C to replace the calculator app. I love the form factor, mainly the keyboard, but they could improve the product adding more memory for programming. It is odd they have an emulator in place to run the original ROM!

BTW I have also a HP 48GX but some buttons become unusable. What is the best shop to repair it?

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#19

Post by nemoniac »

agumonkey wrote: post #13
userbinator wrote: post #6

Notice the distinct lack of an '=' button --- HP's calculators have been almost exclusively RPN-based. It's funny to watch other (newer) developers reactions when they ask to borrow the calculator that's usually on my desk (a 42S) and then give it back several minutes later, with a puzzled look on their faces.

"you've been stacked" -- HP calc owner Last year I finally read the whole manual (as a teen I only used the symbolic differentiator, most useful and magical to my brain at the time). Since I learned about Lisp, so RPN programming features appealed to me. I realized that: 1) RPN has lambda > means (lambda (...) (+ 2 ...)) 2) RPN has a short syntax for them a 2 + >> Yes, 1990 HP RPN had arrow notation out of the box. T…

If you're enjoying that, you'll find even more connections with Forth, also a very cool programming language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

Re: The early history of HP calculators

#20

Post by agumonkey »

nemoniac wrote: post #19
agumonkey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you've been stacked" -- HP calc owner Last year I finally read the whole manual (as a teen I only used the symbolic differentiator, most useful and magical to my brain at the time). Since I learned about Lisp, so RPN programming features appealed to me. I realized that: 1) RPN has lambda > means (lambda (...) (+ 2 ...)) 2) RPN has a short syntax for them a 2 + >> Yes, 1990 HP RPN had arrow notation out of the box. T…

If you're enjoying that, you'll find even more connections with Forth, also a very cool programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

I love stack languages. Forth, Factor, Joy, Cat .. (all the concatenative crew).

ps: there are some Chuck Moore talks on youtube that are worth gold. His CPUs are heaven

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