41–50 of 87 posts
I bought a HP-42S in West Germany in 1989, my first trip to the West when I was 14 (I was Hungarian at the time, now that's fixed, I am Canadian). Oh the memories. Later, 1995, I got a HP 48G via Usenet (eBay opened the month when it arrived from the USA so it's not like I could've bought it there). A friend of mine have soldered four 128K SRAMs in there, stacked, with most legs just ran together vertically with the…
I really really like HP calculators. The only one I have now is the HP-35s, a new version of HP-35. Once you go RPN, you can never go back! I have PCalc (another piece of amazing software) on my phone for RPN. It feels really stupid for others to see that I can't operate a normal calculator.
However I bought a Casio FX991EX recently after using my daughter’s unit which has a modern entry system, solver, engineering units, conversions and dual power. It’s pretty much perfect. Anything else more complicated, I roll out python, scipy, sympy etc.
HP typically priced their equipment at the cost of the material list × π (or in an especially competitive market, list × e)...
> HP’s own LEDs [...] the calculator needed 15 of them > Osborne was able to get the price down to a dollar each > HP typically priced their equipment at the cost of the material list × π [...] the LED display around 20 dollars uh?
1 Display = 15 LEDs + X additional parts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The founders of HP were just so much cooler than the business school goons like Fiorina who practically drove it into the ground. That pricing formula is so playful, as is "well I want one and so do my engineers". Chapeau Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
Ha ha, practically? She did. Keysight is what’s left of the original HP. HP is now known for garbage computers and shitty printers.
However I have enjoyed using their enterprise workstations for the last 10 years are so (various models of Z4xx's) and haven't had any complaints.
It really is hard to over state the impact that scientific calculators had on industry. My great uncle who was an engineer at the Panama Canal company had log tables, these were tables of logarithmic values given a number, and the inverse. He needed the heavy tome because he couldn't get enough digits of precision out of his slide rule. He was one of those people who immediately bought an HP-35 when it came out and w…
It really is hard to over state the impact that scientific calculators had on industry. My great uncle who was an engineer at the Panama Canal company had log tables, these were tables of logarithmic values given a number, and the inverse. He needed the heavy tome because he couldn't get enough digits of precision out of his slide rule. He was one of those people who immediately bought an HP-35 when it came out and w…
Wouldn't happen on the HP-35. The keys were double-injected, meaning that the symbols on the keys went all the way through.
While I am definitely fond of the HP-35 in a nostalgic sense, my real-life working calculator was the HP-48GX when I became a land surveyor. I added a COGO card that would calculate pavement design, storm water pipe modelling, and the area of a polygon after the coordinates of each point were given. And away I went. There wasn't much I couldn't do with that, graphing or calc-wise. Made my job so much easier in the fi…
On iOS, I use the Emu50G app, which works, but could really use some improvements and optimizations. It's a fork of emu48.
Incidentally, I think the HP-50G is the last good engineering calculator. I'm puzzled as to how people get around without one these days: don't tell me about python, scipy and other similar shells: there is nothing else out there that can do so much, so efficiently.
Unfortunately, consumer electronics are not the same as the days of Braun. 70’s was the golden era. I was extremely pleased with my DM42 from SwissMicros. All of their models either have a Titanium or Steel case. The heft and quality is just absolutely beautiful. I spoke to Michael Steinmann and he seems to be a great guy passionate about what he does. I enjoyed our conversation about old school electronics. Check ou…