7 Jan
2014
7 Jan
'14
8:14 p.m.
I picked the TI because at the time (~1979), it had nearly the same
performance for a considerably lower price. However I now have awful
THe HP41 was a much mroe expandable ssytem than the TI59. Or at least,
IU've never seen an TI59 controlling a benchtop of HPIB instruments,
savign the readiungs to floppy disk or tape and then trasnmittign the
logged data over an RS232 link. I do that with my HP41 all the time.
I don;t think the TI ever had a realtime clock, did it?
And fo course the HP had an alphanumeric dispaly.
2) I quibble with Tony?s recommendation to reject a machine that says
Sin(Pi) = 0. I?m pretty sure the TI says that; the quicker but
essentially equivalent test I always used to taunt my HP-41-equipped
friend was (Sqrt(2))^2. The TI said 2, the HP said 1.99999? I claim
Actualyl, that is soemthing rather different.
If you take a decimaly approxiamtion of SCRT(2), rount it after, say, 13
digits, then square it and roudn the reult to 10 digits (or whatever),
you will get 2. But if you take any finite numbero dgiits of pi,
calculate the sin, the answer is not zeor. It's of the order of
10^-(numbero of digits). So even if you take 13 digits of pi, the SIN
should not display asn zero. I suppose you could argue that if you took
over 100 digits, the result would be zero (since a number of the order of
10^-100 will underflow to 0), but I doubt that the TI uses 100 digits
anywhere.
-tony