61–70 of 87 posts
How can you not love this: > HP typically priced their equipment at the cost of the material list × π (or in an especially competitive market, list × e)
I can't really think of any other company or product line I've had such a longstanding relationship with. FWIW, I still have both of my HP calculators and they work great!
An anecdote about the HP-35, from the HP Museum ( http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm ): > The HP-35 had numerical algorithms that exceeded the precision of most mainframe computers at the time. [...] This forced time-consuming manual comparisons of results to mathematical tables. A few bugs got through this process. For example: 2.02 ln e^x resulted in 2 rather than 2.02. When the bug was discovered, HP had already sol…
100K units in the first year, vs your king of consumer electronics today: the iPhone, which pre-sells and ships 100K units in what, several minutes? I understand not everyone buys calculators, but that’s sort of the point of the article that this was marketed as a ‘consumer’ electronics product rather than scientific equipment. Also there’s much less friction and much more marketing today, but it’s wild to imagine ho…
You really can't compare those numbers, yes, the HP was a consumer device, but the manufacturer of any consumer device back then would have been happy to sell in those numbers.
The good news is now it can be yours for under $2 if you already have an iPhone:
An anecdote about the HP-35, from the HP Museum ( http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm ): > The HP-35 had numerical algorithms that exceeded the precision of most mainframe computers at the time. [...] This forced time-consuming manual comparisons of results to mathematical tables. A few bugs got through this process. For example: 2.02 ln e^x resulted in 2 rather than 2.02. When the bug was discovered, HP had already sol…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have my dad's slide rule, and his HP-35. He's a retired industrial research scientist. At my dad's workplace, every scientist had a Friden 55. The managers compared the price of the HP to the annual service contract on the Friden, and bought an HP to try out. They were going to let each scientist have it for a week, then pass it on to the next person. Instead, after just a couple weeks, the Fridens were all in the…
Awesome. It's proving a little tricky to find a picture and/or more info about the Friden 55. All I'm getting is other models. Was it mechanical? (Hopefully some of them ended up in attics, they sound mildly interesting even if just from a historical-interest retrospective standpoint)
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah...
It's fully mechanical and can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I saw one of these things work, and it was quite an experience. There's a YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKm9eM2BuM0
And a few people have published images of the service manual.
My dad said that while the Friden was accurate, it was not portable or quick, and he usually used his slide rule, notebook, and graph paper. For a chemist, slide rule accuracy was usually sufficient.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha ha, practically? She did. Keysight is what’s left of the original HP. HP is now known for garbage computers and shitty printers.
And calculators...?