16 Apr
2011
16 Apr
'11
12:58 p.m.
Consider: When was the last HP-16C calculator sold?
Why did HP quit
selling it, but still sells the HP-12C financial calculator to this
day? It would seem that if there were really a market, the 12C
YEs, but they discontinuesd the 11C and 15C 'scientific' calculators
too, andI've yet to hear that 'trigonometry is dead' :-)
More eriosuly, many later HP calcualtors (inclduing all the RPL models)
have the normal bitwise functions, shifts, rotates, etc. Yes, the 16C has
a few more, but the ones on a 48, say, do all that most low-level
programmers would need.
And yes, I do use an RPL calculator for that sort of thing sometimes. The
unlimited stack is very useful. I recently wrote an RPL program which
contains none of the normal '4 functtionms' or any of the trigonometric,
logartihmic, etc functions. Just a lot of ANDs and ORs, etc.
chassis could be reprogrammed to continue the 16C
line. But it's not-
Almost certainly iy could. The original Voyager machines contained 2
chips. A NUT CPU (which also contains the keyboiard interface) and an
R2D2 (ROM/RAM/Display Driver). The latter is what was different between
the various models. IIRC, the 15C had a 3rd chip to give it more ROM (and
RAM?), this was an R2D2 with the display driver seciton disabled I think
-because few need to sit over a dump and work out what
went wrong.
Because nobody works at that level any longer; it would not be a
profitable product for HP.
FWIW, I use my 16C practically every day. But I'm
old.
So do I... I even had to repair it (dry joint on one pin of the R2D2) a
couple of months back.
-tony