Celebrating the HP-35 Calculator With a New Model 203
An anonymous reader writes "Hewlett-Packard last week announced a contest whereby HP-35 fans create and submit videos of their favorite calculator memories. HP will choose the best videos and you can win a 50-inch, high-def plasma TV. But everyone wins, because HP this summer will debut a special new calculator model. The details aren't announced, however, it's likely to be a 35th anniversary edition of some sort."
"35th anniversary edition" (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see an updated 48GX (Score:3, Interesting)
But everyone wins, because HP this summer will debut a special new calculator model. The details aren't announced, however, it's likely to be a 35th anniversary edition of some sort."
I love my HP 48GX. I'd love to see an updated 48GX with a faster processor and more memory. Mine is 11 or 12 years old and I still like it better than anything that has come since then, including all of TI's offerings which many schools prefer. With all the advances in semiconductor technology, you could pack a lot more memory and performance into the same package. Hopefully we won't have to wait for a 48th anniversary edition.
Re:Wrong calculator (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, the 15c's features were a superset of the 11c's features, with the exception of the register allocation scheme. But they can do that however they want these days.
Geeky stuff for the un-geek (Score:3, Interesting)
I learnt to program on an HP29C overalmost 30 years ago. 98 instructions (well keystrokes) of programming and only a few registers forced you to be pretty frugal, although at the time we thought that was pretty plush compared with the HP25 whiuch had half the memory.
As I type this, I have an HP48SX and HP28S on the desk in front of me. Great devices. My kids both use HP48s for their routine calculations & programming too.
Re:"35th anniversary edition" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Probably the 41CV (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TI (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day when HP still made calculators, everyone else -- TI included -- played second fiddle. HPs were the premier pocket (or belt-loop pouch) calculator from the early Seventies to the mid nineties, more capable, more durable and more desirable than TI, Casio, or any other pretender.
Too bad they abandoned the market and now only sell rebranded units from Asia. Check http://www.hpmuseum.org/ [hpmuseum.org] for the complete history of the HP calculator.
HP 35C set the direction for my life (Score:3, Interesting)
18 years later I joined HP.
15 years after that and I'm still at HP. It's not the same place that it was in 1992, but then again what place is? I'd still rather be here than at the other computer makers, but the software and services companies are where the real action is now. Unfortunately, few of them seem to have that same "engineer's company" feel that HP did back in the day.
FWIW I don't blame Carly, though I didn't like her either. It was inevitable, with commoditization of the hardware.
Re:As easy as 1 ENTER 1 + (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PLEASE DON'T USE THOSE DAMN CHEAP KEYS (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, they never stopped making quality business calculators. The 12c has been on the market continuously for more than 25 years.
Re:As easy as 1 ENTER 1 + (Score:1, Interesting)
(And it have a special key...)
The state of calculator development? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fifteen years on, it looks like the high-end calculator market has all but been abandoned to mathematica. Prices for the calculators haven't budged a dollar, while the price of all of the components have dropped to next to nothing.
Who is still making these things? Who, if anyone, is still competing?
Re:TI (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been a few years, but I remember in things like physics labs where you have to do a lot of number crunching, all of my lab partners would always plug along dutifully on their TIs while I would have done the calculation twice (once and then a double check) using RPN on my 48GX. I don't use a calculator much anymore, as MATLAB tends to be quicker for the things I need to do, but whatever HP lacks in computational power, it makes up for in efficient syntax.
Finally it makes sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
I, for one, welcomed our new hp overlords
1973, Jr. year (OMG!), Florida (yes, the Gators)
$300 very hard earned real dollars went into the hp-35, maybe (judging from house and car prices) $3-5k today) and about the best money I ever spent
As they say, it let me concentrate on concepts rather than number crunching; within a year everyone had one (or the awful TIs) and engineering (and science) would never be the same. Take offense if you must, but RPN users are smarter.
Followed by a 67, 25, 21, 41, 28, 48 (G and GX), 49 and recently another 21, for the collection. They all work. By now I use a 48 and only do basic stuff, with smarter (always hire smarter people) young engineers doing the hard stuff under my possibly wise direction
We worked with hp on several tweaks; an admirable co. and group of guys.
If the surprise is a gold plated hp-35, I'm in line. What will you young guys see in 35 years, post singularity?
To quote the now prehistoric Grateful Dead: "What a long strange trip it's been"
Sears golden ratchet (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RPN (Score:2, Interesting)
For instance, I could say, to a native english speaker, "handed me the man did a book" and it basically makes sense, because the word endings/forms are right, while "hand me the man does a book" just doesn't make any sense at all. Signs like "park two dollar" or "no refill outside cup" really rely on word order to make sense in English, because they are totally ungrammatical otherwise,and you need the grammar to work at least one way (word order or endings) to make sense in English. These examples are kind of bad, but you see what I mean (it's also hard for a fluent speaker to even come up with the kind of bad examples that non-fluent speakers come up with). Euro languages have been moving more towards word order being important and less to word endings being important since like, the fall of Rome. I expect the influx of immigrants to English-speaking countries will probably exaserbate that trend in the coming decades, as it seems to be easier to remember word order rules than word form rules.
Christ this off topic, sorry.
TI-Nspire (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.ti-nspire.com/tools/nspire/index.html [ti-nspire.com]
* 320x240 Gray Scale LCD
* CAS Functions.
* 16MB RAM
* 20MB Flash
First Geek on Campus: Univ. of Mich. (Score:2, Interesting)
It finally arrived in late September.
So how did I handle it? It was the only one on campus that I was aware of. I took it to my professors and asked if I could use it in class and on exams. After they wiped the drool away, they all said yes.
It saw the greatest use in the dorm, loaned to engineers taking surveying. I adopted a policy of loaning it to anyone in the dorm (Bursely Hall) that asked to borrow it. Everyone knew it belonged to me. It always came back.
Predictions: Talking about calculators in class that same year (1972), I took a three ring notebook turned it sideways opened it and suggested the facing cover would be the display screen and the keyboard would be where the pages were held; a personal laptop computer. I had to wait another twenty years for it to arrive on my desk.
Worst experiance with it: I missed an 'A' in a mechanical design course by one point. I took a square root (one key stroke) instead of cube root (x raised to the y) on the final exam. The professor wouldn't budge.
I wish I still had it. After graduation, I loaned to to my employer's wife for to calculate discounts in a flower & plant store she was running. The store was broken into and it was stolen. They paid for a later model (21 or 25??).
I didn't like little leather case that came with it; too insubstantial. I bought a zippered bible cover and a bakelite case at Radio Shack. I trimmed the case to fit inside the bible cover and then lined the case with nylon lined neoprene to absorb shock. The 35 fit perfectly inside. I still have case. I keep my LCD multi-meter in it.
If I had it I would probably have it mounted on the wall in my office.
Re:RPN (Score:3, Interesting)
For the Chinese, that would be very true. There are no word forms. All words are fixed with no tenses, no gender (save for the gender-specific words themselves, like "man" or "woman"), no conjugation at all, not even plurals. Having learned some Chinese, I can now read the bad signs with clarity (aside from the ones with bad translations). The errors are simple and predictable for people that have never been exposed to words that change.