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."
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
...strike up the violin. TI-89 for life!
I have owned both HP and TI calculators. I have several of each. And I can say, without reservation, that the HP calculators are of the highest quality and last for decades. The TI keypads are doubling up numbers and missing keystrokes in a fraction of that time. This is a sad day when we have to choose between Sharp, TI, and Casio as our big-name calculators.
You remind me of someone saying "I'm glad Ferrari is going out of business. Chevy for life!"
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 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
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
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/
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.
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.
Yeah - I got educated in TI-virtue back around 1982. I was teaching a Mod Phys class, and one of my students did a 3-color psiXpsi* calculation during a lecture. "Oh yes Dr-Who it looks like this ..." Damn my HP could not do THAT !
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.
That's exactly what happened when I was in high school 10 years ago. My math teachers all had HPs and loved them. The next year, the school must have made some deal with TI, because the teachers were forced to use TI calculators, and they didn't like them nearly as much. They kept their personal HPs at their desk to use, and only used the TI to demonstrate how to do something on it.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
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.
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 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."
Dolly Parton (or Pamela Anderson, etc) bought a size 69 bra. But it was too, too, too big. So she took 51 pills, 8 times a day and ended up...
6922251 * 8 = 55378008
On another note, I showed a selectivly cropped graph of y = abs(sin x), semi resembling a pair of tits to a friend of mine. He said he would be impressed if they jiggled. So I drew a couple frames and whipped up a program to toggle them back and forth.
Eventually, I had multiframe pornos with different scenes. Luckily, the batteries fell out and the memory got wiped out before the vice principal had a chance to look at it.
Also, we stored equations for calculus exams. Nifty stuff.
It's not just engineers that use the heavy duty HP calcs - the HP19 is popular in the professional economics and hedge fund/financial analyst world... very handy for working out a bond yield or price-earnings ratio on the run. Ironic then (in a small way), if this closure is a result of the HP-Compaq merger and subsequent demands for "synergy" and efficiency by Wall Street.
...for both Hewlett and Packard to die to do this.
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?
The current state of affairs is emblematic of a larger shift in the software industry that's been ongoing for a while.
It might surprise many people to know that HP's most recent calculator offering, the HP49G, uses a 4 MHz Saturn processor. This is a 4-bit (yes, 4-bit) processor that was originally introduced (at a blazing 0.64 MHz) to support the HP71B calculator in 1984.
A friend of mine showed me his HP28C calculator in 1987. This was the first of the HP calculators to support symbolic manipulation of expressions; I remember being impressed not only at the power of the calculator but the careful thought that had gone into its design of its user interface. I didn't learn until much later that this was all being done using a processor that was underpowered even by the standards of the day.
It turned out that a lot of the power was due to the work of a team assembled by Bill Wickes, then a physics professor at the University of Maryland. He'd purchased an earlier calculator, the HP41C, and had discovered a bug that allowed him access to the calculator's machine code. It didn't take long for folks to become conversant in this "synthetic programming," which allowed people to do things with the HP41C that the calculator's designers never intended.
HP was first and foremost an engineering organization at that point, so they hired him (the fact that the DMCA didn't yet exist also prevented them from suing him into oblivion) to design the next generation of calculators, which included the HP28C, HP28S, and the HP48 series. Development stopped in the mid 1990s for a while, but the current Australia-based group led by Jean-Yves Avenard and Gerald Squelart have continued to develop miraculously functional software for surprisingly limited hardware.
The capabilities of modern hardware have advanced so quickly that it's much easier to miss the beauty of small, quick, functional code. It's easier to write big, bloated code--and let the hardware make up for the resulting inefficiency.
Now I run into occasions where the user interface for the operating system (never mind the underlying application) on a Pocket PC that's based on a 206 MHz StrongARM 32-bit processor. While I wouldn't want to roll back the clock on hardware performance, I hope that the art of writing fast, lean code doesn't become an unintended victim of progress.
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)
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?
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
Uh, I remember playing ping-pong in Z-Shell 4.0 in stereo (*right speaker* blip *left speaker* blip *right speaker* blip) and listening to audio files on it ("Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word"). You had to go to RadioShack and get an adapter to go from the calc's comport to the 3.5mm (?) that your headphones used, but it worked. I also remember seeing grey-scale images on it. Mmmm 8-bit, 128x64 pixel porn.
I guess it would be nice if the TI85s had IR ports and more memory (28k is a little weak) but it was neat at the time.
Now I just use my calc for doing math, blah.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
The Corvallis development operation was shut down in the early 1990s (1993?); development was moved to Singapore and then essentially shelved until 1997. In late 1997, high-end calculator development was started up again in Australia; they released a few high-end calculators (most recently the HP49). So the demise of the Australian development shop most likely means that high-end calculator development at HP has stopped.
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-