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 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.
...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 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?
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-