25 Aug
2011
25 Aug
'11
1:36 p.m.
On 08/25/2011 02:29 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Ah yes, but most of my work involves sitting at a desk in front of a
And of coure much of mine involves a soldering iron, logic analyser,
lathe and hacksaw ;-)
It's pretty scary, actually. I mean, I love my HP calcs (my everyday
machines are a -41CX, a -28S, and a -48SX) but honestly most of the time
I just type "bc" in whatever terminal window I happen to be working in.
Erm, have you tried balancing even a laptop on a lathe bed? Many times I
need to claculate angles, amount of metal to remove, etc and an HP
calculator is a lot more usable than a PC... computer. When I work at the bench, I always have an
HP-41 handy.
Ah right. I keep my 16C on my electronics bench, and generally use the
49G when I am doing metal-bashing.
I like the 41 series (I have forgotton just how many I own, the only one
I don't have is a halfnut 41C [1], I do have a 'bug 1' for example), but
really as a small computer rather than a calcualtor. And althohgh I have
the Extended I/O module nad the DevIL [2] module, I find the HP71 is a
more useable HPIL controlelr (and with the HPIB interface converter, the
HP71 is a great tool for testing HPIB devices).
[1] Halfnut means it has the later construction with evrythign on one
board and the memory as part of the display driver hybrid. This
construction was introduced after the 41C was discontinued (it was as
cheap to procue the 41CV with 5 times the memory, apparently), so the
only halfnut 41Cs that exist were service replacements. I find it curious
that they exist at all Sinec to make this machine, there was a different
display hybrid cirucit (it's not just a different link setting to disable
the extra memory), they mucst have been fairly expensive to produce. I
would have thought it would have been cheaper to use 41Cfs as service
replacements ofr unrepairable 41Cs.
[2] The HPIL Development ROM module, of course.
-tony