Slashdot Mirror
Celebrating the HP-35 Calculator With a New Model
An anonymous reader writes "Hewlett-Packard last week announced a contest whereby HP-35 fans create and submit videos of their favorite calculator memories. HP will choose the best videos and you can win a 50-inch, high-def plasma TV. But everyone wins, because HP this summer will debut a special new calculator model. The details aren't announced, however, it's likely to be a 35th anniversary edition of some sort."
Wouldn't it be great to see an innovative new calculator design from HP to mark the 35th anniversary rather than a re-hashed "special edition" of some classic design?
No, Bring Back the 15c!
Seriously, the 15c's features were a superset of the 11c's features, with the exception of the register allocation scheme. But they can do that however they want these days.
Back in the day when HP still made calculators, everyone else -- TI included -- played second fiddle. HPs were the premier pocket (or belt-loop pouch) calculator from the early Seventies to the mid nineties, more capable, more durable and more desirable than TI, Casio, or any other pretender.
Too bad they abandoned the market and now only sell rebranded units from Asia. Check http://www.hpmuseum.org/ for the complete history of the HP calculator.
I am not a crackpot.
In maybe 1974 my dad, a Civil Engineer bought an HP 35C. Even though it cost a fortune (in those days), he let his 10 year old son (me) play with it. I remember being so impressed with it that it cemented my impression that HP was THE company to work for, if you were an electrical engineer.
18 years later I joined HP.
15 years after that and I'm still at HP. It's not the same place that it was in 1992, but then again what place is? I'd still rather be here than at the other computer makers, but the software and services companies are where the real action is now. Unfortunately, few of them seem to have that same "engineer's company" feel that HP did back in the day.
FWIW I don't blame Carly, though I didn't like her either. It was inevitable, with commoditization of the hardware.
That's why I carry my trusty 33s. I've sold many of my co-workers and associates on RPN just by running circles around them on complex calculations. They're parsing parentheses and I'm writing numbers. It is sad that yet another part of HP that made it great is all but dead. HP is dead, long live Agilent. (though I can't complain about my LaserJet 5si)
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
The 50g is anything but a fisher price calculator. I have a [dead] 48gII and a 50g, and the improvement in quality is (obviously) like night and day. I do believe they are done with the crappy keyboards of recent years.
Also, they never stopped making quality business calculators. The 12c has been on the market continuously for more than 25 years.
A person who has spent time with an HP will run rings around someone with a TI on almost any calculations
It's been a few years, but I remember in things like physics labs where you have to do a lot of number crunching, all of my lab partners would always plug along dutifully on their TIs while I would have done the calculation twice (once and then a double check) using RPN on my 48GX. I don't use a calculator much anymore, as MATLAB tends to be quicker for the things I need to do, but whatever HP lacks in computational power, it makes up for in efficient syntax.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
TI is coming out with a new calculator this fall, called the Nspire...
http://www.ti-nspire.com/tools/nspire/index.html
* 320x240 Gray Scale LCD
* CAS Functions.
* 16MB RAM
* 20MB Flash