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Hewlett Packard's Cult Calculator Turns 30
Hugh Pickens writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Hewlett Packard's HP-12C financial calculator has remained outwardly unchanged since its introduction in 1981. 'Once you learned it on the 12C, there was no need to change,' says David Carter, chief investment officer of New York wealth-management firm Lenox Advisors, who has owned his 12C for 22 years and still keeps it on his desk. 'It's not like the math was changing.' The 12C, which costs $70 on HP's website, is HP's best-selling calculator of all time, though the company won't reveal how many units it has sold over the years. The 12C still uses an unconventional mathematical notation called 'Reverse Polish Notation,' which eschews parentheses and equal signs in an effort to run long calculations more efficiently."
The 12C still uses an unconventional mathematical notation called 'Reverse Polish Notation,'
I still use the HP-41CV I bought new, made in Corvallis, Oregon ($400 or so at the time, with a card reader). Iâ(TM)ve never been able to do any significant math on a calculator that did not use RPN.
At least in the courses I took, most people preferred RPN.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is the scientific version of the same calculator, complete with RPN, a stack, plotting functions, matrix functions. I've had mine since 1991. It's a shame they tried to replace it with one that is crap.
Tamran
You would think given that calculators still sell pretty well and this one is doing good for 30 full years that HP would maybe consider that they made a mistake in essentially killing off this line. Wouldn't it be wonderful it HP put out hand device for engineers as far advanced a the HPs were then?
Anyway the scientific version of the 12c is the 15c: http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp15.htm
And my love was the 28S. http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm
Now bring back one of the models the scientists/engineers will care about, like the 15C or 42S.
If you find one in the wild, and don't have a personal use for it, Ebay it. Those things are worth their weight in gold. Sold one for almost $200.
Since when is math English?
Math isn't even "the universal language".
Even among mathematicians.
What does the "N" in "RPN" stand for?
Lighten up, Francis
Look at any business school class these days any you will not find very many HP-12Cs or TI BA-IIPlus calculators anywhere. Most serious number crunching is done on a spreadsheet so the only use for one is if you are in a meeting or need to do a very quick calculation when a computer isn't readily available. (happens now and then) The HP-12C is a fine piece of equipment but if you have a spreadsheet available it's kind of like using a slide rule. Sure it works but it probably isn't the best tool available most of the time.
I'm actually a certified accountant. I have one of the TI BA-IIPlus calculators and the only time I have used it in the last 8 years was to take a certification exam. (they only allow those two calculators in the test) Otherwise it sits in a drawer and gathers dust. Frankly I can't imagine I'm going to use it in the next 8 years either. For reasons I cannot fully grasp a lot of accountants still insist on using paper tape calculators to add up long strings of numbers even though they have a spreadsheet available on their computer. I can't begin to count the number of times I've seen accountants repeatedly type in long strings of numbers because of typos. Strange people who aren't willing to change with the times. I'm waiting for one to ask for the "4:30 autogyro to Siam one of these days.
She gutted HP calculator R&D. The HP49G was the last new calculator they designed, I believe, and that was approximately 10 years ago. I still have my trusty, old HP48GX. I don't have a chance to use it much these days, but it is resting at a place of honor in my home office. HP made excellent calculators over the decades and it is a shame that a short-sighted CEO ended that legacy.
This calculator is like a screwdriver: a perfect fit for the task.
The Platinum shipped with a bug. The 12C...well, there are no bugs.
RPN is great. Once you get used to it, you never look back. BTW, RPN is what the Forth programming language uses.
When doing financial calculations or shopping I always take it with me. Also to the bank. It creates an instant bonding between you and the manager (those initiated in HP 12C's RPN).
HP calculators, IIRC, were used to calculate the orbits in some early space program missions (YouTube). I think it's safe to say that the 12C is more numerically trustworthy than some Pentiums that came out....
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The "C" suffix stood for "continuous memory", meaning that programs and data did not disappear when the calculator was shut off. Like what every calculator does today. Before then, however ...
My first HP was the HP-25, a glorious invention when it came out in 1975. It had 49 programming steps, and the program had to be re-entered from the keyboard, line-by-line, every time the calculator was turned off. My first real programming success came when a high school math teacher, trying to show how hard it was to determine whether a given number was prime or composite, asked my class to determine whether the number 300,000,007 was prime or not. (Thirty-five years later, I have not forgotten that number, and don't think I ever will.)
I was able to program a test for primality into the HP-25. It was brute-force, of course -- checked for an integer result when the argument was divided by two, and then every odd number from three up to the square root of the argument -- but it worked, and I was able to show that 300,000,007 was prime. The teacher was impressed, both with the calculator and with the fact that such a large number that she picked out of the air at random turned out to be prime. (I don't think she new or cared about programming.)
I love that calculator. The HP-25C came out the following year, and the HP-25 became an orphan, but I still have it -- along with an HP-48G+ purchased about 12 years ago. (Finding a new calculator with RPN turned out to be harder than I thought.)
As someone who posted up-thread about still using his 30 year old HP scientific calculator, and who also has Mathematica installed on his small portable computer (a 13 inch TimelineX), I can address this. Each tool has its own area of ideal application. I can crunch through some rapid calculations with my little calculator much more easily than I can boot my laptop. load Mathematica, and enter the same series of numbers and operations in it, even if I havemy laptop with me. Pressing the sin button on my HP is faster than typing Sin[ ] on a keyboard.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
And now you've misspelled "realize" as well.
The 9 key on the HP 12-C, Platinum edition is not reliable after being pressed a few thousand times. This has been reported by many finance types, and makes the platinum unusable.
As long as calculus isn't involved, a spreadsheet is best. I did an Astronomy masters (finished 2002) and significantly cut down my time doing assignments involving simple algebra by using a spreadsheet. It was a distance course. We also had open book exams, and were permitted to use any calculation tools we wished. The only rule for assignments and exams was no collaboration.
Advantages of a spreadsheet: Repeatable. You can see your work and modify or correct mistakes at will. Graphs are limited but easy. Both statistical and scientific functions. Time saved can be used to do simple checking (plugging the answer back into the question).
Reverse polish is good on old style calculators for exactly 2 reasons:
1) You have the limited input and output of a calculator keyboard and screen.
2) You more closely mirror what a turing machine/computer is doing, so if you're trying to understand one it's a good way to get closer to the architecture
Reason 1 disappears if you spend most of your time sitting in front of a relatively modern computer.
Reason 2 has less to do with the calculation than it has to do with IT and computer science. And once you have a good understanding, you're just reinforcing that same knowledge.
Spreadsheets are excellent but have no native ability to solve or graph calculus equations. For that I would use a math package. Octave and SciLab can be had for free. Matlab, Maple, and Mathematica for more money if you're serious.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I first learned RPN in the seventies on my first calculator, an HP 45. When it was stolen in the eighties, I got an HP 16c which I still have and which still works flawlessly. At work I mostly use RealCalc on Android with radix and rpn modes turned on, but I also keep a 48C in reach. I *can* operate a regular calculator, but RPN makes so much more sense to me.
My daughter took to RPN easily at 13 years old, but it confused her teachers so she had to go back to conventional notation.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Because sometimes you just want to pull out a simple tool, punch in a few numbers, and get an answer instead of waiting for an application to load, remembering the exact syntax the app wants, and THEN getting around to the actual inputting of the numbers.
Strange thing is these cost as much as they did when i bought mine 20 + years ago.. They should be cheaper now, so what is up with that?
If you figure $61 based on a google search, and calculate the inflation-adjusted price then you see that it's only actually $35.71 in 1990 dollars. So they have become significantly cheaper.
It still works great, and I use it every day in my job.
I also have the m48 app for iPhone, which is a handy HP48 emulator that similarly works great when I'm out and about.