Slashdot Mirror
HP Calculator Department Closing
Beans writes "Today is a sad day for the engineering calculator world. HP calculator department is closing. www.calc.org has the scoop. Leaving employees just announced it on comp.sys.hp48. You can check google groups for the original posts."
...strike up the violin. TI-89 for life!
This is really, truly sad. I used a TI-85 in high school and didn't want to part with it when they made us buy HP calculators in college. Now that I've used one for over six years, I've got to say, I love the things.
:)
Sure, now I pretty much think in postfix notation, but there's nothing wrong with that.
Damnit...I guess this means no more calculator pr0n for the geeks in the back of math class.
-- Bandit450...If-Else-Do-*TWITCH*!
My 12C accounting calculator has been with me since the 80's. She's old faithful!
Someone you trust is one of us.
The call center I work at does the HP Calculator Support. Good thing I changed my mind about transferring over to that team. . .And the link is blocked by our beloved MS SurfControl. Anybody have an alternate link with the same info?
Sad
enter
Is
enter
This
enter
+ + +
Is there anyone else that does RPN execpt HP? :)
Dont need that damned = key.. just slows things down... And ya im a FORTH programmer too
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow --- that's hard to swallow. This is the company whose calculators got me through both highschool and college, first with the 48SX and then the 48GX.
To help them live on, is there work on a 48GX emulator for Linux anywhere? I haven't found one on either freshmeat or sourceforge.
Wyatt
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
I fondly remember my dad's old hp that you could write programs for, in the late 60's early 70's (i think). This is a shame, TI calculators suck!
I love this calculator.
I have had it since 1986 and it is on its 5th set of batteries. (Yes, I use it.)
I wish someone could make another 15C for me.
I will be quite sad if it ever dies.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
I loved my old 28C when in school used my wife's 48G today! The very first app I installed on the Palm was a HP calculator emulator. Hand me a "normal" calculator and I fumble all over the place.
For me, the 48G was my first exposure to hacking hardware. They had port you could buy (not an option) or build an adaptor - and could use kermit to communicate with it.
Students today have no idea what they are missing when they pull out their TI...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Guess Taco won't be able to lust after a Beowulf cluster of 48's any more. :(
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Having used my HP49 for quite some time now I have to say that it really is a great piece of engineering.
It is true that the main usage field for HP calculators is engineering and science, but in my opinion HP should have tried to sell more calculators to high school students and schools, because if someone is used to use TIs he is unlikely to switch to HP unless forced (after all, 170$ for an HP49g is not exactly cheap).
It's a pity to see the HP calcs go. Let's hope the HP calculator community keeps being vital.
...for the geek community.
Sorry.
Casio
I know HP's cutting back because of the economy, but I wonder how much more of this is simply Texas Instruments' dominance in calculators. I know of only one high school in my area that uses the HPs and none of the departments at my university use them either.
I never could understand the reverse polish notation, but I always thought the IR in the HPs were a much better idea than the physical link cables of the TIs.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Anyone remember the time when Erwin was stuck in an old HP Calculator?
Michael C. Hollinger
same number of keystroke
HP of today reminds me of DEC and Lucent. None of these companies seem to be able to market and profit from the fruits of their massive engineering talent. None can dispute the quality of the hardware and software in HP's calculators, but HP are not able to turn it into a long-term successful business unit. HP have spun of most of their best products into the mismanaged and unable to execute Agilent. Note the parallel with Lucent. I don't know why these companies let their best products go adrift but I find it depressing.
I've been using HP calculators since I was in grade 5. I remember the first day I received my trusty old 32SII. It was awkward at first, but RPN grew on me very fast. I continued to use this calculater, learning every function for it that I could. I used to laugh at my classmates for not even being able to add 1 + 2 on my calculater. It allowed me to be both pretentious and productive at the same time. It gave me a new unconventional way to look at the problems at hand.
Come university, I went out and splurged for my 48GX. Although I have yet to take the time to learn all of this beast-of-a-calculater's functionality, I know that if I did I would be even more productive. HP calculators are truly ingenious tools.
One thing I must say though is that I don't think it's fair that some educational institutions *make* students buy other more conventional calculaters. Specially in the fields and engineering and computer science. Students miss out by using the old-fashioned calculator, eg: the TI-8[69?]. Students learn and become dependent on their calculaters as they don't ever learn different ways of attacking the given problem. Blame the schools for not letting their students use a real calculater.
All of the calculus books my university used are geared towards using TI calculators. And I hear it's like that all over the country. talk about product placement/sponsership.
The odd thing is, back in 1991-1992, TI's were *mandatory* for class. However, by the time most of my engineering peers got to the higher level engineering courses, they'd switched over to HP's. They said the learning curve was a bit steeper, but it was ten times the calculator the TI was and wished that *everyone* in the department would use them.
Small, fanatic minority group, facing the "monolithic" giant.. Hrm.. Sound like linux to anyone?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I shall not to it tell this sad and dire news. It will be happier to believe that it's family still lives and grows. I cannot so crush it's spirit by telling it that that loathsome monster of poorly-designed calculating devices, TI, shall be triumphant.
Alas.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
I have been using the Hewlett Packard calculators since high school. I wrote a software package for the HP 49G that provides a lot of additional functions, and is free. I was using my HP 49G just this morning to get my MAT 3701 homework done. I will be using the HP 49G a lot longer then I had planned, apparently. I really prefer RPN. Anybody interested in providing startup capital for a new calculator company?
Best Slashdot comment ever
It seems like the calculator market has been dominated by TI's products for as long as I can remember. They certainly remain supreme in the graphing calculator business. While high schools continue to recommend the Ti-83, it isn't going to be easy for any other company to sell their calculators. It is probably best for HP that they end their adventure into the calculator market.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Ever see a student ask a teacher how to do something on their HP?
I have yet to see a teacher have a clue how to use it, most are limited to TI-83s. Most math classes I've been in would have as much as one person with an HP, and the only way they could get any help is if they were lucky enough to find someone else with one that read the manual.
It seems like the professors had the most control over what students bought, first day of class it's normal for them to suggest that their students have the same calculator as them. I wouldn't be suppressed if TI figured this out and made sure the teachers were holding their product.
I started college in 1981 and HP-41C's where state of the art at the time. You could solve 16 simultaneous equations at your desk, as opposed to walking to the lab to use a mainframe or TRS-80. My girlfriend at the time bought me a top of the line HP-41CX for Christmas and she called it "baby Hewey" (of course I had to marry her after that!)
The were some of us hackers who used a backdoor to do "synthetic programming". One trick was to get the goose to fly backwards. Anybody remember that? How many of us have grown up to be linux/unix hackers? I bet most of us . . .
Oh the good old days . . .
Smokin' Joe
The link mentioned in the topic is trashed. I searched the newsgroup and checked hpcalc.org and they make it sound like ACO is closing, but the calculators will still be made. HP's website still has the calculator section, with no mention of shutting it down. Man... Want to get the full scoop before I break the bad news to my father. He's sworn by HP calcs for 25 years. Can anyone clarify what is actually happening?
My wife and I studied using the HP (Me Mechie and She Electrical Engineering). The HP was the greatest calculator to hit the market. The others simply did not understand what an engineer wanted from a calculator. I remember looking at the TI's or Sharp or whatever... They all just were not up to the task. This is a sad day...
:( (Holding my candle...)
Christian Gross
I've been using HP RPN calculators since I was a little kid. My dad's 25C is about as old as I am and still works. My 48G got me through high school and college math with much more style than my TI-using friends :p I get teased about being old-fashioned for liking RPN, but I still think it's a much more fluid way to think and compute than infix notation, and there was this neat kind of bond between all the HP users. Kind of unhappy to know that there will be a lack of RPN calculators in the future.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
I am signing up for college this january and I still have my old ti-85 with 32k of ram from 94 back in high school. From what I have seen is that the hp calculators are more programmable and more powerfull then TI calcs. I also know my plam m100 is alot more powerfull then either one. My palm has has a much more powerfull processor ( 20 mhz I think) and 2 megs of ram not to mention its alot more programable. I can download python, a lite version of java, as well as free c compilers for it. Perhaps we (as in the fsf community) should write some gnu calculator and mathmatical utilities for it and try to convince palm to focus on this market. My math skills are not quit there to write some of these utilities. Palm is hurting for marketshare and if they could sell palms to graduate engineering and science students who want a powerfull graphical calculator plus a few other goodies then they could gain some mindshare and more profits.
Lets compare. $179 for a top of the line HP calculator vs $149 for a palm m100 with a todo list, games, calender, alarm, free compilers out on the web, and a scientific calculator sounds like a much better deal. Students need to plan time and the palm could do this as well as be a calculator. Not to mention you can beam programs back and forth with the IR port. A pda is like a calculator on steriods. Its really a mini computer. The only difference is you have virtual buttons on the screen rather then physical ones. Graphing is slow as hell on my TI-85 and I fear IT may harm innovation if they dominate. I do not want TI to dominate the whole calculator market.
http://saveie6.com/
now I have no choice but to play games on my TI86 in math class.
scubasteve http://www25.brinkster.com/irx/scubasteve
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those :D
:D
Sorry, somebody had to do it
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
55378008 == BOOBLESS
7734 == hELL
304 == hOE
And then I pull out my TI-36, push HEX, and type
FA9907 == faggot
DEADBEEF == dead beef
50CCEA == soccer
I got my 15C for a HS graduation gift (it still works fine!), then later a 41C, and a used 28...
HP calculators had a long history of being at the front of good math, too. They got Velvel Kahan to come in and do their advanced math functions and numerical analysis (the HP advanced functions on the 15 book got me through some tricky numerical analysis!)
What a loss. And as the previous poster said, yes, I'm an inveterate FORTH programmer too...
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
I have to say, i was given a 48gx by my family for chistmas one year in high school. I remember sitting around figuring out how to write games for it, i remember using it in calculus class, and i keep it on my computer desk and use it almost every day. I love that poor old calculator. I love the fact that it has a hierarchical filesystem. It just plain rules. Plus on top of that it's really burly and indestructible...
Goddamn.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Reverse Polish Notation Lives
and
This sad is.
Hey, that's almost like English! Makes you wonder.
Head over to www.ticalc.org, and I'm sure you'll find some - interesting - files.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Somebody already asked about a Palm Pilot being a suitable replacement (er, successor). There are certainly scientific calculator apps for Palm Pilots and similar devices, and there are already hp calculator emulators in various states of functionality for various platforms.
I wonder what HP is going to do with the many years of development that went into the roms and downloadable software that we've all come to know and love. Would Bruce Perens be able to swing an open source release so that the hp calcs can live on? And if that were to happen, what would be the best way to make use of such software? Would a Palm Pilot with perhaps a native port of a 49G rom be feasible? A strongarm port? A transmeta-based super-calc?
By the way, I still have my 28s somewhere, my 48GX was stolen, and I have a 49G right here next to my keyboard. At least I'll have it to show to my grandkids, or something like that.
There are all sorts of hacks you can do to a TI graphic calc, including the installation of backlights, remote controls, overlocking, memory expansions, and homemade link cables. I don't think we need complain about the lack of hackable calcs, even though HP is gone.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I own an HP49, and was familiar with the HP48G. I know most HP users think TI's are crap, Mostly because of the lack of RPN, (they do have a nice interface though :)
However, to my original point, the TI 89, (which the HP 49 was built to compete with) uses RPN internally. Every time you evaluate an expression on the TI 89 command line it is run through a parser that tokenizes it into RPN statements that end up on the expressions stack. It would be very easy to write an assembly program to provide an interface similar to the visual representation of the stack present on the 48/49. It would be even easier to write such a program using tigcc. In fact, to do symbolic manipulation using tigcc you have to feed all the data into the expressions stack then process it in RPN. The fact that the TI89 uses flash technology means you could add this functionality permanently to the calculator's featurelist. This would be a fun program to write if someone wanted to give it a shot, and all you'd really be doing is taking out the middleman.
Was a HP35
in 1974
And I still prefer RPN calc's
I hated it in college when they wouldn't let me use it on tests because it was "programmable". It takes me at least twice as long to do anything on an infix calculator.
1.) Standardized testing and exams. For both of these in college, a lot of the time you will be required to use a standard graphics calculator. When that happens, having a high-end TI or HP calc is very nice.
2.)Speed. Maybe it's just me, but I find I can enter numbers a lot faster on my TI-83+ than I can on my Revo Plus, which has a keyboard, stylus, and a variety of graphics calculator apps which really blow the 83+ out of the water.
I'm the stranger...posting to
My history with HP...
I've been using my 11c since around 1987 (I actually got a second one in 1989, but it croaked about two years ago). It's been my favorite calculator since I got it. I've owned lots of calculators, including a casio 8700g, a TI-89, and my current HP48-gx. They're all fine, but I use my 11c more than anything else (I can do almost everything faster with it). Without any text entry/dispaly, it can do most everything I require on a daily basis; it can be programmed (203 steps, 4-level subroutine depth) to do more complex tasks, has more storage than I normally need (21 locations). It doesn't look fancy (no LCD matrix), so it could fool any of my math teachers into thinking it was an 'ordinary' calculator (now remember this was '87, and it had already been out for 6 years). It is by far and away the most useful single (i.e. never replaced) piece of electronics that I use on a daily basis. HP you have served me well, and will be missed (from the calculator business). I don't know what I will do when this HP-11 dies. Maybe I should keep a lookout on ebay.
A great resource on older HP calculators can be found at: http://www.hpmuseum.org
Great job HP. About time you dorks realized you need to stop making calculators and start having sex.
I think we can all agree it's no contest - neither sharp nor casio calcs are near as programmable or hackable as TIs - even if you think that TI calc are edsels compared to HPs, everything else is pretty much a horse-drawn carriage compared to TI.
I'm the stranger...posting to
But I will miss Reverse Polish Notation. It's funny to see the look on peoples faces when you loan them an HP cause they forgot their calculator and there's a test in 5 minutes.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
One thing though, we were once dealing with a real bugger of an equation, and to solve for variables on the "wrong" side of it, he just had us put as many numbers in it as possible to crunch some of the algebra out of it and then solve. One student asked him about changing it around, and he said he did it by hand a few years ago and it took him eight sheets of paper and about two hours. I did it on my TI-92+ sitting there in class in about five minutes.
He couldn't help but be impressed.
My point is that the HP croud acts so stuck up sometimes that they can't admit that some TI calculators have some really neat featurs. It's not a Chevy vs Ferrari debate, it's more like Chevy vs Ford. I'll agree though, all TI calculators except the 92* and 89s suck ass.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''I run hpcalc.org and would like to clarify this article.
HP is not ceasing the production of calculators. Instead, HP has shut down the department that develops new calculators.
This is nothing unusual. In the mid-1990's, HP already effectively shut down calculator development for several years.
The manufacture of calculators is completely separate from the development, and production will continue.
I recall the glory days of my Engineering school. There were two classes of engineers, those with an HP and those without. The thing ate matrix algebra (the kind used in RLC circuits) for breakfast. It did graphing of calculus functions. It calculated 253! faster than my 80286 did 49!.
My HP28S _STILL_ enjoys a place of respect, even if changing the batteries is a pain in the ass (and it uses an odd size too) and even if all I do with it now is basic math/trig/etc. I don't need the powertool for what I used it for since I'm now a software engineer, but I still can't use normal calculators - RPN has spoiled me.
RPN has got to be one of the most sensible ways to do things for anyone who ever understood computer systems - stack operations just make so much sense!
But alas, RPN hurts the heads of the mass of the uninitiated or the uninformable. And so, a legend of quality goes to the boneyard. People would rather have the sub-capable alleged "calculators" on the Palm100 (what a piece of crap) than have something that can _really_ do complicated math (even complex math and convolutions and all sorts of neat stuff) with brutal speed. I guess that's probably because math (the kind done by people, rather than expensive software packages) is largely a dying art.
Ah, the memories.... the first time I heard someone play all of Star Wars from the HP... the first time I aced a mid-term because my calculator reduced the mindless number crunching to a manageable task.... the first time I encountered complex numbers because the HP spit back an odd result (x,y) and the y part was the complex component.
Sad day indeed.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Since I first got my hands on my 48GX back in '95, I've been a convert. RPN makes an incredibly elegant interface for rapid computation, and HP makes some sturdy, ergonomic hardware to boot. (Gotta love those clicky keys--much more "positive" than the mush that TI puts out.)
Just for the record, this is all your fault. Yes, you. You know who you are. You bought the TI-8x because it was cheap and everybody else had one. (Kinda like Win95, except for the cheap part.) I hope you're happy--next time I have to buy a calc, I will be forced to relearn algebraic entry. Of course, judging by the rate at which my HP48 is deteriorating/becoming obsolete, it may be 10 years before I need another calc.
I am doing my part to keep the culture of HP calcs alive. I wrote and maintain rpc, a curses-based RPN calculator which is very much in the spirit of the HP line. (Yes, this is a plug, but I thought it was appropriate...)
Hey, you think they might release the ROM under an open license? If they did we could start to bundle it with the number of HP emulators out there. It would make the ultimate calulator replacement for my desktop... :) Well I can wish can't I?
I used fanatic in the above post. It didn't look like that in the preview (it properly closed the italics). Slashcode has really gone downhill in the past few months, and it's getting really annoying.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''While I carry a TI-89 day to day, I've really come to admire the HP calculators through use of an emulator. http://www.hpcalc.org has emulators for the 48GX, 48SX, and 49, as well as several ROM versions for each calculator. Best part is it's legal - HP gave them official permission to post the ROMS on their site.
back in '93-ish my 48Gx was my first laptop/pda.
i kept outlines, notes, phone numbers, all kinds of things in there. plus the obvious uses for math/chemistry/physics.
and what awesome buttons. ruined me for life on telephones, keyboards, you name it.
that unit was so awesome for so many different things, i can't imagine buying another hp calculator as long as i live... which i guess is part of why they're shutting down?
what an odd business model: make it so good they'll never need another one.
, i'm just rambling now,
This is a sad day for me. I have a special attachment to HP calculators as do may of us here. As a supergeek in high school, I participated in competitions of math and science skills, including calculator applications. Even came in 4th in the state my senior year! :)
Nobody who valued speed and accuracy used anything except HP's. Other kids would be using their butt-slow infix calculators for sharp, ti, and casio. We'd blow them all away! The amazingly solid, tactile feel of HP calcs meant I never had to look at the calculator when doing problems. I was a HP touch calculatorist! When I think of how fast we could run numbers on those things back then, I'm still amazed.
Of course, given the horrid pounding we gave them, we ran through an HP per year.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
Then we could distribute x48 complete, and HP would live on forever....
This is scary. I have an HP28S, but I am afraid of what to do if it ever dies. Tonight I am going out to buy some N Types for it.
:(
BTW, does anyone know if this is the only item to use these types of batteries? I hope not or else we will have to do something drastic to use them.
...for both Hewlett and Packard to die to do this.
Roms are free for about a year now. check www.hpcalc.org
thanks loads eric!
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) what the HP's default to was for me, hard to get used to. I use TI-8x's and feel more control using them. RPN is great but it should not be a default setting in my opinion. It's like having to translate to your translator.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
people should chip in on the X48 project at sourceforge to keep the product alive. HP donated the calculator ROMs to the public domain for the 48GX and lesser models, also for the 49 series. the emulator looks just like your favorite calculator, right on the X display. sweet!
Here is a google cache link...
E :w ww.calc.org/+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:2BlWEqnbO7
It is very unfortunate that this story linked directly to www.calc.org. They have been having server troubles for a few weeks now, and getting slashdotted doesn't help. At the moment, www.calc.org is the only (TI) calculator website with a decent archive. www.ticalc.org (by far the largest archive) took it's archives offline because of some 'bad content' which stems from the CD that they made in conjunction with texas instruments.
the ti community could use some help right about now...
Greg
www.geocities.com/gdietsche/
and yes... Gravity still works! (and some times that can be problematic)
Hi. I'm Jean-Yves Avenard, working for HP (not for much longer) The closure of ACO has nothing to do with calculators. In fact, HP stopped the development of new calculators two years ago and started to work on low-end PDA. It's the economic downturn that's forcing HP to restructure itself and there were two divisions working on PDA (APCD in Singapore and the Jornada) I would have other comments, but I've just signed a paper saying that I can't say anything bad about HP, and there's lot to tell :)
Cheers
Jean-Yves
This is scary. I have an HP28S, but I am afraid of what to do if it ever dies.
Me three. Indeed, my 28S is showing signs of its age. The plastic battery door is gone, but the metal part is still there, so it still works. It's more precarious, though. More distressingly, somethings come a little bit detached on the right side keyboard, so that the faceplate is a little bit loose and occasionally the keys bounce. But I'd be very very sad if I had to do without this, or some other HP.
I've had this thing since 1988. One of the best Christmas presents I ever got.
-Rob
You guys did some magnificent work, and your products will be sorely missed. Thanks for all you did, from a very satisfied customer.
I love my 41-C, and I'll probably keep using it for the rest of my career.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
sad
HP is no longer a job for life
HP no longer does the R&D
HP no longer has the guts to just go for it
read history and see whats comeing
regards
john jones
The HP-35 was the original hand-held scientific calculator. I worked all summer carrying garbage to buy one for $495 back when $495 was worth something, men were men, women were women and they didn't joke about it.
Seastead this.
The 28S is the only calculator I've seen that uses N cells.
:)
My 28S was the very first purchase I made on the first credit card I got back in university. Lots of money to shell out for someone fresh out of high school (back in 1988), but after an engineer friend of mine showed me his, I had to have one.
It's been the only calculator I've ever needed ever since, and still serves me faithfully, although I don't have the occasion to use it quite as often as I used to. I've heard people complain about the clamshell form factor, but it's the toughest and most durable calculator I've ever seen. I had a bit of a scare a few years back when I pulled it out and discovered the batteries had leaked all over it. Thankfully, cleaning off the battery contacts brought it back to life.
My brother got himself a 48GX a few years ago, and was bragging about it, but I could still calculate circles around him with my 28S.
BTW, the 28S currently exists as a financial calculator in the HP line.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
If you write to HP, they'll send you a new battery cover. Mine broke off when I accidently dropped it, so I wrote them and to my surprise they mailed me a new battery door cover.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
It is very unfortunate that this story linked directly to www.calc.org. They have been having server troubles for a few weeks now, and getting slashdotted doesn't help. At the moment, www.calc.org is the only (TI) calculator website with a decent archive. www.ticalc.org (by far the largest archive) took it's archives offline because of some 'bad content' which stems from the CD that they made in conjunction with texas instruments.
The ti community could use some help right about now...
Greg www.geocities.com/gdietsche/
and yes... Gravity still works! (and some times that can be problematic)
Please learn how to spell calculator. You should go back to school and spend less time playing with your toys.
According to hpcalc.org, it's the *Australian* HP calculator group that's closing. Is that the entirety of HP's calculator development operation?
IIRC, the HP-41 was developed at a facility in Oregon. Did they move the whole group to Australia?
Anyone from HP available to comment, please?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
please disregard this comment... i goofed on the hyper link... i reposted and this time i did something absolutely amazing... i checked my links :)
Greg
It's time that Carly step down. Being a former HP employee I can tell you from first hand experience that she is the reason that HP is on the verge of bankruptcy. While I worked there the stock price was around $35 a share. Friday the stock closed at $16.92. She leads the company, this decision is hers and it's a bad one. Now maybe investors will wake up and smell the coffee and get this great company back to where it belongs. When a company sheds it's core products, that got it to where it is, in favor of flashy mergers and media hype tis a sad day. Having personally net David Packard and Bill Hewlett I can say that both of them are spinning in their graves halfway to China by now.
The advantage of RPN is more than just the raw number of keystrokes.
When I'm solving a real-world problem, usually I have the numbers (or you look them up when you need them), then I need to put them together semi-interactively. You look at the number on the screen, decide what the next step is, then do it.
RPN let's you type the number in, then decide what to do with it as you go. Algebraic/TI notation is only really useful when you've got a long formula on the page, and you want to read it left-to-right, parentheses and all, and just hit = at the end.
That happens a lot when you are a student who is just grinding through textbook problems, but hardly ever happens when you are thinking on your feet.
The levels of precendence used in the algebraic system are based on rules that make it easy to read equations on paper. There is no intrinsic reason why multiplication is higher precendence than addition, it just happens in practice to be most legible to write equations that way. When you're dealing with numbers, trying to get other numbers, the RPN stack let's you do things with the precendence that works best for thinking through the problem. APL has even a screwier behavior than RPN, but people who use it (I don't) swear it makes solving problems easier.
Another one opens. We can't all live on nostalgia.
And, for anyone depressed about HP leaving, now that HP has got rid of it's Calculator department, the classics that HP have been made will be antiques.
Let's just pray that HP never leaves the printer market. Let's just hope...
I still use my HP10c on a near daily basis. It is from the mid '70s. If it dies before me, I'll get another HP calculator. However, it seems that it is one of these "buy once in a life-time" type things. Great for the consumer, but not so good for the producer. HP hadn't yet heard of engineered d obsolescence then, I guess.
Best wishes,
Bob
Not that they're likely to fly off the shelves but I've been meaning to get an HP for a while now and all of a sudden they're going to vanish completely.
Not to mention the fact that I'm not even sure where to buy an HP calculator. The few places I've looked just have Casio's and TI's. Didn't Wal-Mart used to sell some HP's at least?
I would find it a real pain in the ass to have to learn even the HP way of entering in simple algebra....Of course, I'm not saying that HP shouldn't keep making calculators, but there are a lot of people complaining that TIs are cheap crappy imitations, and for most people thats just not the case.
And thanks for all the calculations.
What ? Me, worry ?
lamenessfilter breaker
What sense does this make? The Board of Directors or HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina must swim in defeatism.
What does it say to shareholders when you admit that the company you run can't make something as simple as calculators profitably? If HP doesn't go out onto the field at least believing they have what it takes to win in the arena of calculators then where, exactly, do they believe they can come out ahead?
While this might be considered a 'wise business decision' in some quarters I can guarantee the people here at HP will not see it as such.
I subcontract at HP for a living. Talking to HP employees is not an uplifting event. By and large the best of the developers would leave if the economy weren't so bad. If the economy does, hopefully, pickup then you will see a mass exodus out of HP. The 'HP Way' was a fiat agreement that used to tie the people of HP together in a partnership that went beyond business. That is gone now.
The promise used as a tool is soon broken.
I still have my HP-41CV. I've had it since HP first released it. This little baby was THE calculator in its time. I went so far as to do assembly language programming on it (required special hardware). My 41 still sits on my desk for whenever I need to do some quick math.
Recently, I needed to buy a calculator for my daughter. The school specified a certain TI model. So I bought her a Hewlett-Packard calculator. I refuse to let the school dictate what companies I will do business with. Besides, TI calculators are junk.
-- Will program for bandwidth
HP just hasn't been the same since losing Bill and Dave.
They have this all over www.thenakededge.net
Yodafied is.
KFG
RPN is a lazy programmers shortcut. Casio + Sharp + TI simply rock!
HP fanatics said they were GLAD their crappy RPN calculators had no mode to disable RPN and allow infix notaion with parens.
They liked it being hard to use.
And reason and the masses spoke and Casio and Sharp gained market share until HP was totally irrelevent.
almost like the way command line oriented unix is heading.
That was the toughest thing to do until the PPC ROM came out. I still have mine, and use it for the complex-number functions.
My 41C has the upright keys and the 'old' HP logo. It was expensive when I bought it, but it turned out to be the best piece of electronics gear I've ever had.
I have the HP 49 and a TI 89. The problem is that the hp 49 while having better written software uses a slow 4 Mhz chip while the ti 89 uses a 10 mhz chip. The HP calculator just isnt as responsive as the TI 89. alot of people say that the hp 49 has better algorithms such as risch for doing integration. While that may be true, you can download such programs for the TI 89. So it seems that the software of the TI 89 is catching up to the HP 49. The screen on the HP 49 is abysmal with the plastic coating, low res and hard for me to read. The rubber keys on the keypad arent as good as the HP 48GX keypad. It seems to me that if HP is to continue to compete with TI they are going to have to make thier calculator faster and provide more readability for the screen. I have been told that the they cant speed up the processor without starting over. But I think emulation on a faster processor might fix that. Surely a calculator with a ARM processor emulating an HP 49 would be much faster than what they have.
I just bought the HP 48G+ a while ago and I haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilties. The freaking User's guide is as think as my math book. Learning to use all of its function will require a seperate math course Regarding isolating variable that guy was talking about, G48 can do it easily as well. ANd oh ya, gotta love the 3D graphing in the 48G! You bring me a calculus book and show my any calculus question, and I bet my G48+ can whip up a solution in no time (considering you know how to do the question!) I was thinking of getting the PC kit for it. Does any one have it? It's pretty cheap ($40-60) and it will let me import my programs and apps and stuff into the G48+. Lotta of other cool pre-made apps for download too.
One of the things I wanted to do when my HP48G dies (which might be never) or when I find a broken HP calculator is to figure out how to build a snap on, or maybe a wireless linked, keyboard to the Palm platform. I know it's possible, it just might need a little PIC chip doing the translations. That calculator was always with me through my EE degree, and we used to joke that the engineering jackets used to have oversized inside pockets to store them perfectly.
A palm with the HP keys would be the ultimate. The tactile feedback on the 48GX is incredible and allowed me to "know" I did a calculation right, whereas the other ones and later models TI lacked that positive "thunk" feel.
Anyone wanna send me a busted HP? :)
..don't panic
Maybe because TI has worked on their calculators a lot in the past ten years while HP hasn't changed one bit. The HP is better than TI argument may have been true ten, maybe even five years ago, but TI has continuously upgraded and added features to their calculators while HP has done nothing. Get out a TI 89 and look at the features it comes with. Symbolic math, 3d graphing, a 68K processor, a C compiler, and a shitload of features that HP doesn't have.
Is this really true?? I cannot find news about it...
Over here in Western Australia, our official high school calculator is the HP38G. Some students use the Casios (being seduced by the colour screen) but for the most part, we're trained to use HP calculators and like it :)
:)
Personally, I started with my HP38G in grade 10. I was the first one in my year with the calculator and at A$190 (about US$100), they were a very pretty toy to play with. I started coding up a few simple programs, eventually writing a small text based RPG for it
Then when I got to university, I convinced my dad to splurge out on the latest HP49G when my 38 was stolen... At $349 (about US$180), it was more expensive than the Sega Dreamcast I got for my 18th birthday. I still use it today to do some basic physics stuff and just for looking at those plain cool things on hpcalc.org
Talez
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I was the geek in HS that was walking around with this crap Novus RPN calculator that I won in a contest. It was cool, but wasn't much more than a calculator for me. When the 41C was announced, I was in heaven. Aside from it being $300, and myself having no money, it was what I wanted most in this world. I even cut out the ad for it from an OMNI magazine (remember those!), and framed it.
That year for xmas, after everything was open, and we were milling around the house, my mom told me there was one other present under the tree. I could have died when I got the wrapper off. I taught myself to program with that calculator. I would spend hours sitting around and write games for it, learning to convert bases, it got me into learing math that my teachers were never able to get me interested in. It set the course for my life as an engineer. It wasn't until years later that I was able to get on a computer, and learn to do anything more.
A few years ago, I was in a pinch, and sold my 41C on Ebay. I felt like shit after it was gone. So much time, so much passion went into that little box of electronics. I have had other HPs since then, up though the 48s. No matter what they do to the HP calcs, there will always be a warm spot in my heart for them. I doubt I would be where I am now without them.
Thanks HP!
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
My Mac LC475 uses an N battery as its backup battery, which is a real pain because it's in continuous discharge and the battery isn't recharged at all. Every other year or so, it has to be replaced.
I've also come across some bicycle flashers, the little units that emit red light towards the rear, that use those batteries.
They're obviously not the most common battery you'll ever come across, but you shouldn't have much trouble finding one.
These were awesome, when I was studying engineering, the hp-48 was the bomb. I am beyond sad.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Parent posting is Insightful!?!?, If you haven't even used the both calculator, how can you comment on 'the HP way of entering simple algebra'
Open your mind... You should never be afraid to try something new... In HS, I too laughed at the bizarre RPN that was used by HP calculators, but as I continued studies in college, I gave RPN a chance, and found that it was definitely with the learning curve. Problems in Engineering and Physics were much easier with the HP then they would have been on a traditional calculator.
Once you get into industry, are you going to tell your manager, no I don't want to learn to do that, it seems like a pain in the ass?
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
My HP42S still rocks and I purchased it back in '90. That being said... I said it once and I'll say it again:
CARLY FIORINA IS AN INCOMPETENT MORON AND SHOULD BE FIRED!!
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Using my 48sx to solve the problems in electronics class that they taught us to solve graphically. My answers were more correct because I could more accurately pic the spot where they intersected (I forget the actual problem, but the answer was the point which both curves intersected....i got a severe case of CRS...). Nice calc! I remember seeing ANIMATIONS done on this thing and these had IR transfer BEFORE palms did. I even seen games done on this, but not many. I miss my 48sx....damn thing dropped through a hole in my backpack when I was still in college. Damn.....had ot buy a casio to replace it and i never recovered since! I even had a IR thermal printer too! You could print your graphs and pics out on them. Very nice. I need to get another HP calculator.
Gorkman
I am a longtime user of HP's calculator products. RPN is the one for me. I had them from the 16C to the 28 (clamshell!) and finally a 48.
Now I have been buying another line of products from HP, their Pocket PC line. You can see from theit HandHeld versions the same keys and engineering that went into their calculators.
On my new HP 568 Pocket PC I have a fully functional HP48 empulator. It runs about as fast as the real thing, but it's just not quite the same. The interface is just plain difficult to use, being a mock up on touch screen. Too bad.. I really loved the HP for being able to whip up quick programs on the fly when I needed.
I even had some extended percision math routines I wrote in assembly for it. Those were the days.
At least HP includes an RPN calculator for the Pocke PC in ROM now. The funny thing is they didn't even make it! THey just include another companies product. Kind of sad.
--
Ian
(www.ian.org for HP, Amiga and Imagine stuff)
(www.sportsmogul.com for Baseball simulation!)
I still own 2 programmable calculators myself and use them with some regularity, but it must be more than 10 years since I last programmed a programmable calculator. It seems to me that by the time I would bother to write a calculator program for a task, I'm sufficiently out of the spontaneous use space of calculators that I might just as well sit down at a real computer and use a spreadsheet or perl or C for the job.
Is there anybody here who really writes and/or uses programs for programmable calculators on a daily basis?
My Sr. year of high school(1975/76) I worked at the HP Calculator Division in Cupertino... Best job I ever had...
I delivered coffee and donuts twice a day and served deli sandwiches on the lunch line.
A couple of buddies liberated a keg from one of the beer bashes, when it was empty, the keg was put to use as a tv stand.
One of the maintenance guys (Bob) accused us of taking the keg... we denied it for 18 years. At our 30th birthday bash (flirty, dirty and thirty), we finally admitted it to Bob... yeh... you had been right all along...
I used to think that my HP48 was slow, too. But these things have a 16-key type ahead buffer. Once I stopped waiting to see my keypresses and intermedite results on the screen (possible, thanks to a really nice keyboard), and I learned some of the menu sequences (i.e. Blue - 6/UNITS - A is the unit convert function "CONV"), its slow response didn't bother me at all.
The calculator actually skips some redrawing of the screen if there keystrokes pending, so you don't have to wait for it to render all the in-between steps.
True, it would be nicer to be faster, but once you know the secret, it isn't a hinderance. My 48SX has a 1MHz processor, compared to your 4MHz! I don't know about the 49, but the 48GX (@ 2 MHz) has software that's about twice as complicated, so it doesn't feel any faster than the 48SX.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
You would think they would have made something a little more flexible, like a palm by now. Oh yeah, my Visor does have a calculator that does unit conversions and what not. It replaced my $17 sharp calculator from 1990 last year for about what I'd have to pay for an HP.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
My trusty Keuffel & Esser sliderule model # 4041, patented June 5, 1900... You're all posers.
Can you just imagine having to put your command line args in RPN?
/etc/passwd | grep fascdot | cut -d: -f7
MyCalc%> mv file1 file2
error: argument missing
MyCalc%> file1 file2 mv
MyCalc%> cat
cut: error: argument "|" is invalid
(I was going to re-write that in RPN, but I can't even figure out how pipelining would work--so forget it)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Outside of the world of single-line input calculators (look at "calc" on a Windows system), RPN has no place; modern, powerful calculators allow you to input a formula in its natural written form.
The software powering the TI-92+/TI-89 is indeed more powerful than that of the HP49g; I know from experience. The TI-92+ however, is truly unrivaled (the qwerty keyboard brother of the TI-89). There is simply nothing (short of a laptop running Mathematic or Maple) that can compare to the productivity increase the comes with having a full qwerty keyboard.
Not only that, but TI calcs have an intriuging community that really brought about a change in my own interests; I doubt that I would be doing what I am today had it not been for TI calculators.
check out: http://www.ticalc.org
Another example of a company who couldn't handle the output of it's brain trust was Xerox and Xerox Parc.
There's still dc.
I will still enjoy my 34c and 65 for many years.
They were more expensive than other calculators, but if you ever opened one up u would see, there is a lot of gold in there.
Anyone know where to get new batteries?
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
It must have been 25 years ago when I first saw an HP caclulator. They were bolted to the workbench in a University Physics Lab. It left a lasting impression. The Rolls Royce of calculators ...
...
A few years later, I brought my first HP calculator - an HP34C, I think - I used it when I first started my first job as a Structural Engineer. Some ten years later, I sold the HP34C to a 'serious HP collector' in Australia. I hope it still working hard for him too.
A succession of employers have given me HP's for my daily work, mainly HP41 variants. They were all quality machines that provided years of solid service under heavy use.
I fondly remember the HP11C(?) that the Surveyors lost when being chased by a dog. They got it back the next day - from the offending dogs kennel - by a clever diversionary tactic. The dog had been chewing the calculator overnight, and teeth marks were clearly visible on the aluminium band. And the calculator? Well it's still in daily use.
I'm going to miss HP calculators
HP discontinued dos-based palmtop few years back,
then now Calc.
What is next?
Yes HP calcs are very good. But one of the things that made it even more fun was all the accessories that were available. EduCalc had a nice selection before they went out of business. One could even hook up an A/D converter to the machine. Wow!
Ah calc users have all the fun. Wonder why the same can't be done with computer calcs?
Actually, HP has quite a good reputation as a financial calculator, too. I use one for my Finance class, the HP 10BII (which, incidentally, costs the same price as the competition from TI).
One of the things I like about the HP is that they use quality keys. They're very stiff and provide great tactile feedback. Not like those little rubber thingys that you wonder if you pushed it in right.
OTOH, I used a friend's HP12c the other day, and was a little surprised at how slow it ran. I was doing an IRR computation, which cannot be solved directly but requires the calc to "plug and chug" a bunch of numbers until it finds the right one. My 10BII solved it in a couple of seconds; the 12c took significantly longer. That may not sound like a big deal, until you consider that the 12c costs more than twice as much, and is one of the best on the market. It tells me that the 12c internals hadn't been refreshed in a long time. (Makes me wonder if closing the calc division hasn't been a long time coming.)
My guess is that the market is too saturated with competitors and the margins are too thin for a "premium quality" calculator to be mass produced at competitive prices.
What a shame. It's like the same situation with keyboards; so many crap keyboards flooded the market in the past decade that its near-impossible to find a decent quality keyboard anymore.
OK. Totally unrelated story. A Motorola (making radios, not computer chips) guy was telling me, they made these radios for railroads. Motorola made some changes for a new model, including the case, and suddenly field returns started shooting way up. The railroad guys hated the new model.
A factory guy goes to investigate, says "hey, the new ones should perform much better. We've really improved the electronics, should be much higher reliability. What's the deal?" One of the railroad guys takes a radio in his hand. He says "sometimes, these railcar couplings don't always come apart right, so you have to whack em..." Lifts the radio, and ***WHAM!*** slams the bottom end against the hitch. "The new radios keep falling apart."
This brings back memories. I got my first real calculator, a HP28S back in 1988 just before I entered college at the University of Rochester. My calculus professor actually banned graphing calculators (their was a couple of HP28S users in class and someone complained) in his course that semester. I still have my HP in it's brown leather case on my desk in relatively good shape (the battery lid has a chip on the edge).
This news is what happens when marketing droids (who probably never used a HP calculator in their life) gets to call the shots in a company known for their engineering talents.
Something's not quite right here... The linked article said the group's been in operation for four years. I used HP calculators 15+ years ago, and they were well-established then.
What gives?
I have to say, though, that the HP49 is some kind of utter nightmare. It's as if HP turned its back on all of the good things that evolved over the years and decided that Texas Instruments was the holy grail or something. While the calculator is quite powerful, I find that it's useability is just horrendous and the calculator is actually slower than both the HP49GX and the TI92Plus. In fact, nobody that I know in academia or in engineering gives the 49 a passing glance.
Nonetheless, everyone is entitled to a mistake, I guess. On the other hand, HP has made a significant marketing mistake by not grabbing the hearts and minds of students. Texas Instruments is the king in that regard, if only because of their academic program that gives teachers calculators free of charge based on the number of TI calculators that their students use.
Amazingly, Hewlett Packard has the single largest corporate site in their organization here in Boise, Idaho, yet you'll find that the dominant calculator in use (by far) at the local university is the TI. Why? Because TI gives calculators to the faculty free of charge if their students use enough of them. What is the dominant brand of calculator in the university's bookstore? Yep, TI. And this is from a university that has the 7th best public engineering program in the nation. And is just 10 miles from a huge HP campus. Go figure.
Still, I'll be sad to see them go. But I wouldn't blame Fiorina for the loss...I think it's been a long time coming.
-h-
ah, the days of the HP48. when all the dumb people were using their ti-82's, the college board frowned upon the hp48. why? because you could make a small adjustment to make the IR port, with which you could talk to other test-takers, at distances of up to 30 feet. it also included a serial port capable of kermit and z-modem; a true hacker's machine.
TI FOREVER!
:P
The TI calcs are superior in just about every way. Have you ever used a ti92/89? It'll let you through second year calculus without doing any work at all
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Man this sucks. I remember writing a 'drunk man and the lamppost' program on my hp-48g in high school. That thing kicked ass. None of the stupid TI kids understood, but RPN is where it's at!
Search first, ask questions later.
As long as we're all getting nostalgic here, let me tell you the story of my first real hacking machine: my HP28s.
Sure, I had an Apple IIc in high school and I did a lot of programming on it, but I didn't do any serious hacking. Not like my HP28s. I wrote all sorts of games and cool stuff for my HP28s: a music program, a poker game with AI (albeit rather limited), and even a couple versions of a Tetris game, all in RPN. Tetris was even fairly playable speedwise after a few revisions. But my crowning achievement as an HP28 hacker was adding an RS232 serial connection running at a whopping 2400bps! Unfortunately, I only ever tested the transmit features which used the IR port because I was afraid to open the case, but another student did get two-way communication going using my code! That was a proud day, let me tell you!
But by then the HP48 had come out, with it's fancy-schmancy built-in serial port (where's the challenge with that?), I dropped out of engineering school to pursue a degree in theatre, and all of the software I wrote is now wasting away on 5-1/4" floppies in a basement somewhere. But I'll never forget all the fun times I had procrastinating my homework by doing "important" research into the inner workings of my HP28. Every once in a while I'll do a Google search to see if any of my hacks have survived on any HP28 archive sites. Ah, the glory days of old!
Thanks for the memories, HP calculater division! You'll be missed!
- Stealth Dave
Evil is as eval("does");
In high school, someone had a 48SX, then a friend of mine got a GX... the IR port, expansion port and stuff was way cool... always thought the LCD could be just a bit better.
I also speak Forth (no pun intended, or is it "Forth speak"?) so that part of the calc was easy. The equation editor was really cool, if a bit slow, but all in all, these calcs were pretty damn nice... it's sad to see them go.
At the time, all I could afford was a TI-85, and it fit my needs.
But, to be honest, a friend gave me a TI-89 a year ago, and I'd totally forgotten about the HP calcs until today. The TI-89 definitely was my ideal calc. (And let's be honest, RPN isn't good for everything :)
Wonder if a 48 emulator could be written for the TI-89?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
As a EE grad, I can say that the school tried to get us all to buy the polish joke calculators Freshman year. I didn't buy the HP; I never missed the HP. My casio huge screen could plot functions awesomely, and met all my requirements for all four years.
The odd seeming interface of vi is good because it's rich. The odd seeming interface of the HP calulators is bad because it provides nothing over over an inuitive interface.
The best RPN calculators
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My HP is my best friend.
It is my life.
I must master it, as I must master my life.
Without me, my HP is useless.
Without my HP, I am useless.
I must use my HP true.
I must calculate better than my peers who are trying to see me fail.
I must beat them before they beat me.
I will.
Before God I swear this creed. .. . until there is no enemy but peace.
My HP and myself are defenders of my science.
We are the masters of our enemy: the ignorance.
We are the saviours of knowledge.
So be it
Amen.
HP calculators have been obsolete for quite sometime now. It comes as no big surprise to me that HP is finally stopping the development of future models (I am sure H & P are rolling over in there graves). Simply put a ti89 gets the job done quicker and faster than a HP. Ever try and evaluate a triple integral with an HP? My experience has been that it can sometimes take minutes to work a problem with an HP that would take a ti89 just a fraction of a second. I took a vector calculus course in college that was technology based. Aside from using computers (maple and matlab) the professor encouraged us to purchase ti89's. The proff even wrote a vec calc package for the 89. Previously the course had been taught with HP calculators, but the proff switched over to the ti89 and told the class how he regrets the sad death of the HP calculator line. In my engineering classes I often work with students who prefer HP's. I routinely solve problems at a quicker rate with my 89 than the HP users in my static's class. I will give the HP some respect on its postfix notation, I will admit that is handy. I still prefer the power of the ti89 with its 3d graphing and ability to get me an A in diff eq and linear alg. I have yet to see anything that the HP calc can do that I can't do with my 89. Yet I see lots of stuff that I can do with an 89 that either takes to much time or is simply impossible to do with an HP. That's why I think the HP line is dying.
I guess what I want in a calculator is a lot like what I want in a computer...
For that reason, I love my 42S that I've been using for 12 years. This is actually my second, first one was stolen back in 1991. Nice simple display, batteries last a long time, good stack manipulation, and moderately programmable. It has even survived two coke spills.
More data, damnit!
Essentially, every time you go into a parenthesis, that's the equivalent of another level in the stack. Every time you come out of a parenthesis, you collapse the stack with the most recent operator. If nothing else, you can very easily tell where you are at any point in time by the depth of your stack. Admittedly, having to go from postfix (on paper) to RPN (in your head/calculator) takes up some brain cycles, but once I got into the stack mentality when it came to parenthesis, it was actually FASTER to work with RPN because you know that the stack will always keep things straight, and you'll never have to do interem calculations.
Just repeat to yourself: Parenthesis Depth == Stack Depth.
the ti89 has a fullblown CAS. I can use it crunch through tripple integrals as fast as I can type!
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think you mean infix (or sometimes mixfix) on paper. Postfix == RPN.
From an 'old hp' lover...
.prc collection :-)
This is indeed sad news, by itself, sad news for those being given a week's notice (Jean-Yves & the rest: it just happened to me as well, so I know how that feels!) and sad news for Engineering with a big E. [beat that: ML coding in nibbles in the 90-ties, 1700 bytes tetris! etc...]
As most pro-engineering designs, hp calculators had their cons that almost prohibited mass adoption: I mean, hp *could* have supported *both* RPN and 'natural' entry. Could have made the [graphic] displays' speeds match the CPUs inside. Could have made the darned things look both professional, serious AND sexy. But no, they had their style, and did stick to it. That's probably this mix we techies both hated (at first) and admired (soon after). I'd rather see the calc division slowly fade unaltered into history than turn into TI/Casio junk.
Now, just notice how many of the posts above, including mine, relate some glorious personal history with hp calcs from 10 or 20 years ago. See a 'problem'...? Yes, all of those calcs still work fine (including my own 48S)! Buttons & everything else work as on day1. Compare that to my PalmV (2 buttons fcuked, cover gum torn, touch-screen responsiveness(?) gets worse and worse). Old HP hardware was built to last. Who of you bought more than 1 HP calculator within a 10-15yr period?
Witness the change in printers or the Jornadas for that matter... 'great lasting quality' & 'consumer products' just don't go together anymore, at least not when technology changes the way it does now. Fiorina's arrival was bound to transform HP from a (slightly-sexier-than) DEC into DELL (sidenote: isn't it weird to see how remaining DEC bits will integrate into HP now they went through the Compaq counter-culture, eh?)
It does indeed look like a page has been turned, and the arrival of the PDAs pushes the calc business to the sidelines. Price & volume economy... And it's not a surprise for anybody: a simple search for 'rpn' on palmgear on turns out 43 entries, those did not appear yesterday! So take the ride & dl that HP12C (or whatever) 'emulator' to add to your gameboy, macII, atari and commodore64
Hopefully, we will preserve the spirit. But I'll ALWAYS MISS the BUTTONS.
I'd forgotten all about the HP15C. That's back in the time of Fortran 3.
You make me feel young again.
Ahhh, back-in-the-day...
First, I got my trusty 32SII in jr high, about 1991. Then I got my 48G in high school about 1994, and when people saw what it could do, everyone wanted one. My friend (who later moved on to MIT) did some hacking and even got the debugger, compiler, and editor burned onto a ROM (he had a GX, i was so jealous =P). Anyhow, you can't beat the productivity of side-ways Tetris!
I still have that 48, but it's kinda ratty as I pried it apart a few times, and I'm still thinking of hacking it to give it 4MB. Hmm, 32K seems insufficient. What's funny is that I can run HP48 EMU many times faster than the real thing, and I can enter data with a real keyboard.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Haha, I sent my father on a little mission when he was in Hong Kong.....to buy me a HP48S. Resisting the temptation to cheat and fill up the machine with all manner of eqautions, I went to my A-Level Maths exam.
:)
Inevitable happened, I got stuck on some really tough questions. I cannot believe how much guilt I had to endure as I watched that little marvel integrate some horrendous algebra graphically for me
Thanks HP, I would not be who I am today without you. A dirty little cheat who can't do calculus.
Po
Well, I must be so old that my brain has forgotten FORTRAN 3. I always thought it went from II to IV to 77 to 8x (never released) to 90 to 95...when they changed it from FORTRAN to Fortran.
But I digress.
It's not a good day unless I bring sunshine into someone's life.
I just turned on the 15c and found that it needs new batteries. At least it takes standard batteries, unlike the N size the 41 took.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Pardon me, but at what point did high school math or physics get complicated enough to need an advanced calculator. I used my HP28S & 48Gx extensively while getting my degree in electrical engineering; however, the most I ever used calculators in high school was for the Trig. (it's a little painstaking to calculate the cos(x) manually all the time.) At some point the methods of problem solving become more the issue than the actual execution of mathematical tedium. However, learning to do the tedium is part of any good education. Are high schools actually promoting the use of technology over actual learning?
http://www.JournalOfTheRandom.com
From the company that bought you:
...so they can sell lots of Windows boxes
...and destroyed Alpha chips in the process
- HP/UX, the only commercial Unix which manages to be worse than Windows...
-
- Merged PA-RISC into IA-64
- Trying to buy out Compaq...
-
HP is unbridled evil.
Me four...the HP28S was the second "supercalculator" I bought. It's an amazing piece of engineering. I actually prefer the clamshell setup to the multi-layered (shift, 2nd function, 3rd function) design of the later models. It still serves me well..it's survived everything. Not much like that is made anymore these days.
...sniff...sob...
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I've had my HP since '93, I just finished up an electrical engineering major and that calculator has seen me through the whole way. I know compared to today's standards it is slow and short on memory, but what a hell of a calculator. It can still compete with virtually any calculator out there, and it's 8 years old. EIGHT YEARS OLD! Amazing. It's too bad that the HP team has been disbanded. Oh, and for what it's worth: I still use the calculator on a daily basis, and it's only on its third set of batteries. To any HP people reading this -- you made a great product. Thank you.
This post will probably be modded troll like my first post, but I hardly care anymore. Its like the hive mind around here, any voice of dissent is going to be silenced. I like typing in 12*67 into my TI. Not 12 67 *.
So, to summarize...when I created a program that was a calculator that could do prefix, postfix, and infix notations, I still like infix. That is the way I'm used to doing it, and I don't have any love for making my life more complicated than necessary.
CS classes don't require calculators at all.
Calc classses dont require calulators for numerical caluations (rather for graphing and symbolic solutions).
Statistics only needs a few formulas, where you plug in some values.
Engineering classses require complex numerical calulations the most, and this is why RPN is the engineers choice. With a stackless calculator, complex compuations require you to visualize the entire equation ahead, or use the memory button to mimic a stack.
I don't know about you guys, but I have an HP30S calculator and its best damn non-graphing calculator I have EVER used/seen.
I has powerful stat functions, linear equation solvers, quadratic equation solver, unit converter, constants, the standard slew of variables/functions, a nice LCD with many lines and easy to enter functions and of course, fractions.
There's another similar TI calculator floating around school, but it doesn't have have the USEFULL features my HP has.
For my graphing needs, nothing beats EasyCalc 1.14 on my Palm IIIxe.
As the person below you said, thankfully, other products use this battery. My wife also told me that a least one camera she has seen uses it.
BTW, the 28S currently exists as a financial calculator in the HP line.
I saw it at Fry's. Does it do everything the 28S does? I may have to buy it for a back-up if it is cheap enough.
You can fly on an HP calc because you know when you've pressed a key. You hear it and FEEL it. Give me a TI and I have to push harder and keep looking to see if the key shows up. I get accidental double presses on TI's too which NEVER happens with an HP. Basically an HP has a feel of quality to it and a TI feels like a cheap toy.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I wonder if it's posssible to port Octave to the Palm. Perhaps even a gnuplot palm terminal.. Perhaps it's already been done.
As far as I know, _every_ calculator in existence uses RPN internally (or something that is analogous in concept to RPN). 89 may have a more complex instruction stack, but what it comes down to is put one operand in one register, next operand in another, and the opcode elsewhere (form an instruction word with it), then execute the instruction word. For complex operations, it will have to execute a lot of instructions to get the answer.
Discussing how this is similar to RPN is not very productive, however I do find TI's regular notation more useful than RPN. 89 comes closer than any other calc to allowing you to enter exactly what you have on paper and get a pretty-print answer.
All in all, it's sad to see HP go, since 48/49 are apparently at least on par with the 89, however I use my 89 every day and I think it really is a powerful platform. At least the ability to write and compile C code into an executable up to 200 K in size and have it run on the 89 is hardly matched by others.
Another remark: I think both TIs and HPs are horribly overpriced. I know that they put some money into writing the software for it, but $150 for the 89 or $170 for the 48/49? Handhelds sold for half this price have several times more memory, faster processor, and higher res display! Unfortunately, HP's demise will only make the situation worse, reducing TI's competition to zero and allowing it to set the prices at will.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
I guess it was a bad sign when my dead battery light on my 48GX came on last night...
I love my HP so much I wrote my own reverse Polish notation calculator for GTK+.
Once you go RPN, you never go back.
I try to help with the development of tilp (a program to link linux computers (and other oses) with ti calcs.)
This is very sad, as I have a couple of (non-graphing) hps, one I got out after someone threw it away, because the battery had come unseated. HPs can beat any other calculator, NO ti or casio currently planned or in existance will be able to equal an HP48gx. Period. However, what is more sad is the reliance on calculators by people. I can still calculate most things in my head faster than people can pull out their calcs and get an answer. However, I have fallen massively in speed. When people used to try to type with their calc, I was faster, then I got a calculator. I relied on it, and that was bad, I first made darn sure I learned how to do something by hand and head first, then I would program it into a calc, but not use it. Taylor series, are fun to do.
Just the ramblings of someone who sees how pathetic most people are without tech, and is forcing himself to be able to do things without much tech (and yes, a pencil counts as tech).
I had an HP calculator that nobody else I've ever known would admit to... the 38G.
It was weird, for an HP... By default, it didn't even work in RPN! Definitely one of the neatest calcs I ever owned, though. My favorite part was the speaker functionality... It's always fun to be able to code your own music player on yer calc.
Er, ok, back to geekland now.
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
A sad day indeed. I've used HP since I was old enough to know what a calculator was. My first was an HP32E. I still have my father's HP45, and my succession of calculators: HP32E, HP41C and HP48SX. Then I went overboard and started buying old calculators, getting (from memory) 15C, 16C, 19C, 19BII, 21, 25, 35, 46, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97.
(Some people have a greatly exagerated idea of the value of a 35 (the first scientific pocket calculator.) Lots were made. Of the list above, I would rate the 19C, 46, 65, 67 and 97 as rarer and more valuable.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
When I was in the airplane design business, I had the 15C programmed with the atmospheric tables along with the basic equations of flight. Came in handier than hell. At the workstation, I'd catch code errors. In meetings, I was like that kid in the GE commercial on the laptop, ordering plastics. Kept my section leader from stepping on himself.
Now, I'm a program manager, and I use the 12C to keep my Financial wiz's honest. I know how to program a mean spreadsheet, but I check it with the 12C.
Both calculators are in my brief case and go with me everywhere. I've yet to wear them out, and, as long as batteries are available, I'll keep them going.
Long live the King! May He return in a new business cycle.
--Stork
Purdue Unviersity, Aero & Astro Engineering, 70
Enby in Waltham
Simplified, you put in both numbers, and then decide which operation you want to do with them. What's not quite so obvious is chained calculations, but that's easy to learn, and wonderfully convenient.
Fwiw, I was one of the first eight Friden EC-130 calc. techs; the EC-130 was the first calc. with RPN.
Enby in Waltham: nbodley [at] world [dot] std [dot] com
I don't know what school you're talking about that require students to buy TI's, but my school required their 5,000 students to purchase HPs.
I'd be ashamed to go to a "engineering" school that required TIs! *shutter*
It was great to play with complex numbers before college, plotting functions, doing matrix computations without Matlab, etc. Eventually, the usage of that faithfull piece of engineerign faded in the last years of university, being replaced by a Pentium running Matlab. But I would never replace my HP 28S with another calculator. All my highschool geek buddies with HPs eventually went into real scientific carreers, while the Ti and Casio crowds became Windows users and live a normal (i.e. management) existence.
I started using it again, as a complement to my PIII. It's much greater fun to get the old HP28S out of the drawer and do some intermediate calculations than opening some calc. window on the PC desktop. It's still a good complement for Matlab. Those keys still feel like the first day I had it, and it's rugged and engineered to suffer all real-world hazards like hitting co-workers and resisting coffee flooding. I never bothered to upgrade to a HP48 that came mid-college as the 28S had enough functions and power to get the work done. And the flip cover/keyboard (disliked back then) proved to be a very useful feature for keeping the screen alive all these years...
Stuff like the HP28S, the first Vectras that you could drop on the floor and they'd keep working, those amazing ink-jet printers that you could actually afford to have at home and use to make good-looking documents back in the dot-matrix era... HP used to be a real company making really great stuff, real instruments for professionals. I do not remember a recent product of HP that I would like to buy, or something that the competition did not have. Except an Agilent Network Analizer that costs several years of salary, but that seems a bit over-engineered to have at home for some occasional measurements... Still, over-engineered stuff makes you drool. :)
My only gripe about the N cells is that HP built the 28S to use 3 of them. I used to be able to get them individually at the university bookstore, but now I can only find them packaged in pairs, so unless you've got another device that only uses one N cell, the other one ends up getting wasted because by the time the batteries need to be changed again, the lone N cell from the last batch is dead.
:)
oh well.
still won't trade in my 28S for anything. it was my very first PDA in fact. There was a simple address book program I found, and even a clock program. Now if only I could find my manuals...
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
OTOH, I've still got my 18-year old 11-C: I still carry it in my flight bag since I don't need anything more powerful.
The death of HP calculators is truly sad. Best things ever made for computation. I think I'm going to go buy a 48 just as a back up.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
What alternatives exist to the HP48/HP49? I've been entirely unimpressed with the TI line, and I'm wondering what to switch to when my HP48GX finally outlives its usefulness.
The 12B is still the "required" calculator used at many, many business/accounting organizations...
I'm glad I have mine, even if the Malaysian 12B's keyboard feels nothing like the excellent keys on my nearly 20 year old US-made 15C and 16C...