5 Jan
2014
5 Jan
'14
3:22 p.m.
I think at some time - don't remember when,
perhaps toward the end of
my degree (which was a science degree, I'd point out) or early in my
career, I knew someone who had a big fat HP scientific calculator that
he was rather proud of as a conversation piece. He showed it to me. It
was incredibly chunky, I think it had an already-retro LED display,
very clicky keys and no '=' button, only an 'Enter' key. I was by this
time peripherally aware of things like Forth, Postscript and RPN,
although I did not yet grasp the point of them. I tried to do a very
simple sum on it. 3 + 5 or something. I couldn't get it to work.
I said so, and IIRC, the owner allowed with a grin that he mostly
couldn't either. He just thought it was a fun thing to own and
actually /used/ a slim Casio that was a tenth of the price.
Hmm... Everybody I know who has used an HP enver wants to use anything
else. There are a couple of reasons for this :
1) RPN (which includes RPL, of course) does what you expect -- every
time. You do now have to worry aobut precendence rules. An
operator/function is executed when you press it. There is no ambiguity
2) HP calcualtors do nto do 'funny rounding'. Casios often do. What I
mean by that is that some machiens roudn the answer to give what the
machine thinks you want. A quick test of this. On a machine with no
symbollic capabilites, select radians mode and calculate SIN(pi). If you
get 0, reject the machine. The point is that the 3.1415926... number
shown on the display is NOT pi. It's a truncated or rounded version of
it. And SIN of that number is not zero. There is no justification fo the
machien t oassume that this number continues as pi. Evey HP I've used
gives a small non-zero value for this.
FWIW, having used an RPN machine for many years I find infix calculators
very hard ot use.
So, yes, to the average European science student type of the 1980s,
there was status in a flashy Casio with lots of buttons, most of which
you never used, but nobody had those bit fat clunky HPs. There were a
few TIs around for the rich.
I had an HP41 at school in the early 9180s. Such things were not common,
but I was certainly not the only person at school to have one. There was
the odd HP32E/33E/34C around too. There were rather fewer TI59s than HPs.
-tony