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HP Calculator Department Closing
Posted by
Hemos
on Sat Nov 03, 2001 05:34 PM
from the it's-the-end-of-the-line dept.
from the it's-the-end-of-the-line dept.
Beans writes "Today is a sad day for the engineering calculator world. HP calculator department is closing. www.calc.org has the scoop. Leaving employees just announced it on comp.sys.hp48. You can check google groups for the original posts."
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HP Calculator Department Closing
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LCD fun (Score:4, Funny)
?Lives Notation Polish Reversed? (Score:4, Funny)
enter
Is
enter
This
enter
+ + +
That's not right. (Score:5, Funny)
Reverse Polish Notation Lives
and
This sad is.
Hey, that's almost like English! Makes you wonder.
Dark days indeed... (Score:4, Interesting)
For me, the 48G was my first exposure to hacking hardware. They had port you could buy (not an option) or build an adaptor - and could use kermit to communicate with it.
Students today have no idea what they are missing when they pull out their TI...
Marketing part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It is true that the main usage field for HP calculators is engineering and science, but in my opinion HP should have tried to sell more calculators to high school students and schools, because if someone is used to use TIs he is unlikely to switch to HP unless forced (after all, 170$ for an HP49g is not exactly cheap).
It's a pity to see the HP calcs go. Let's hope the HP calculator community keeps being vital.
HP reminds me of DEC (Score:5, Interesting)
Blame Educational Institutions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Come university, I went out and splurged for my 48GX. Although I have yet to take the time to learn all of this beast-of-a-calculater's functionality, I know that if I did I would be even more productive. HP calculators are truly ingenious tools.
One thing I must say though is that I don't think it's fair that some educational institutions *make* students buy other more conventional calculaters. Specially in the fields and engineering and computer science. Students miss out by using the old-fashioned calculator, eg: the TI-8[69?]. Students learn and become dependent on their calculaters as they don't ever learn different ways of attacking the given problem. Blame the schools for not letting their students use a real calculater.
Alas, my 48SX (Score:4, Funny)
Alas.
Very Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
HP-41C's were the best (Score:5, Interesting)
The were some of us hackers who used a backdoor to do "synthetic programming". One trick was to get the goose to fly backwards. Anybody remember that? How many of us have grown up to be linux/unix hackers? I bet most of us . . .
Oh the good old days . . .
Smokin' Joe
I wonder if a palm would be a good replacement (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets compare. $179 for a top of the line HP calculator vs $149 for a palm m100 with a todo list, games, calender, alarm, free compilers out on the web, and a scientific calculator sounds like a much better deal. Students need to plan time and the palm could do this as well as be a calculator. Not to mention you can beam programs back and forth with the IR port. A pda is like a calculator on steriods. Its really a mini computer. The only difference is you have virtual buttons on the screen rather then physical ones. Graphing is slow as hell on my TI-85 and I fear IT may harm innovation if they dominate. I do not want TI to dominate the whole calculator market.
What of the software in those calculators? (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody already asked about a Palm Pilot being a suitable replacement (er, successor). There are certainly scientific calculator apps for Palm Pilots and similar devices, and there are already hp calculator emulators in various states of functionality for various platforms.
I wonder what HP is going to do with the many years of development that went into the roms and downloadable software that we've all come to know and love. Would Bruce Perens be able to swing an open source release so that the hp calcs can live on? And if that were to happen, what would be the best way to make use of such software? Would a Palm Pilot with perhaps a native port of a 49G rom be feasible? A strongarm port? A transmeta-based super-calc?
By the way, I still have my 28s somewhere, my 48GX was stolen, and I have a 49G right here next to my keyboard. At least I'll have it to show to my grandkids, or something like that.
rpn on ti89 (Score:3, Interesting)
However, to my original point, the TI 89, (which the HP 49 was built to compete with) uses RPN internally. Every time you evaluate an expression on the TI 89 command line it is run through a parser that tokenizes it into RPN statements that end up on the expressions stack. It would be very easy to write an assembly program to provide an interface similar to the visual representation of the stack present on the 48/49. It would be even easier to write such a program using tigcc. In fact, to do symbolic manipulation using tigcc you have to feed all the data into the expressions stack then process it in RPN. The fact that the TI89 uses flash technology means you could add this functionality permanently to the calculator's featurelist. This would be a fun program to write if someone wanted to give it a shot, and all you'd really be doing is taking out the middleman.
HP and my 11c (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using my 11c since around 1987 (I actually got a second one in 1989, but it croaked about two years ago). It's been my favorite calculator since I got it. I've owned lots of calculators, including a casio 8700g, a TI-89, and my current HP48-gx. They're all fine, but I use my 11c more than anything else (I can do almost everything faster with it). Without any text entry/dispaly, it can do most everything I require on a daily basis; it can be programmed (203 steps, 4-level subroutine depth) to do more complex tasks, has more storage than I normally need (21 locations). It doesn't look fancy (no LCD matrix), so it could fool any of my math teachers into thinking it was an 'ordinary' calculator (now remember this was '87, and it had already been out for 6 years). It is by far and away the most useful single (i.e. never replaced) piece of electronics that I use on a daily basis. HP you have served me well, and will be missed (from the calculator business). I don't know what I will do when this HP-11 dies. Maybe I should keep a lookout on ebay.
A great resource on older HP calculators can be found at: http://www.hpmuseum.org
This article may be misleading (Score:5, Informative)
HP is not ceasing the production of calculators. Instead, HP has shut down the department that develops new calculators.
This is nothing unusual. In the mid-1990's, HP already effectively shut down calculator development for several years.
The manufacture of calculators is completely separate from the development, and production will continue.
They had to wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
hang on a minute... (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, the HP-41 was developed at a facility in Oregon. Did they move the whole group to Australia?
Anyone from HP available to comment, please?
-jcr
Quick... which one do I buy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention the fact that I'm not even sure where to buy an HP calculator. The few places I've looked just have Casio's and TI's. Didn't Wal-Mart used to sell some HP's at least?
HP-41CV Rules (Score:3, Informative)
Recently, I needed to buy a calculator for my daughter. The school specified a certain TI model. So I bought her a Hewlett-Packard calculator. I refuse to let the school dictate what companies I will do business with. Besides, TI calculators are junk.
Use of Fancy Calculators Declining? (Score:3, Interesting)
I still own 2 programmable calculators myself and use them with some regularity, but it must be more than 10 years since I last programmed a programmable calculator. It seems to me that by the time I would bother to write a calculator program for a task, I'm sufficiently out of the spontaneous use space of calculators that I might just as well sit down at a real computer and use a spreadsheet or perl or C for the job.
Is there anybody here who really writes and/or uses programs for programmable calculators on a daily basis?
Linux on an HP calculator (Score:3, Funny)
MyCalc%> mv file1 file2
error: argument missing
MyCalc%> file1 file2 mv
MyCalc%> cat
cut: error: argument "|" is invalid
(I was going to re-write that in RPN, but I can't even figure out how pipelining would work--so forget it)
Love my 48GX, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to say, though, that the HP49 is some kind of utter nightmare. It's as if HP turned its back on all of the good things that evolved over the years and decided that Texas Instruments was the holy grail or something. While the calculator is quite powerful, I find that it's useability is just horrendous and the calculator is actually slower than both the HP49GX and the TI92Plus. In fact, nobody that I know in academia or in engineering gives the 49 a passing glance.
Nonetheless, everyone is entitled to a mistake, I guess. On the other hand, HP has made a significant marketing mistake by not grabbing the hearts and minds of students. Texas Instruments is the king in that regard, if only because of their academic program that gives teachers calculators free of charge based on the number of TI calculators that their students use.
Amazingly, Hewlett Packard has the single largest corporate site in their organization here in Boise, Idaho, yet you'll find that the dominant calculator in use (by far) at the local university is the TI. Why? Because TI gives calculators to the faculty free of charge if their students use enough of them. What is the dominant brand of calculator in the university's bookstore? Yep, TI. And this is from a university that has the 7th best public engineering program in the nation. And is just 10 miles from a huge HP campus. Go figure.
Still, I'll be sad to see them go. But I wouldn't blame Fiorina for the loss...I think it's been a long time coming.
-h-
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have owned both HP and TI calculators. I have several of each. And I can say, without reservation, that the HP calculators are of the highest quality and last for decades. The TI keypads are doubling up numbers and missing keystrokes in a fraction of that time. This is a sad day when we have to choose between Sharp, TI, and Casio as our big-name calculators.
You remind me of someone saying "I'm glad Ferrari is going out of business. Chevy for life!"
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
I really should not say anything bad about Unix, as I am sure Unix machines are great, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Windows line. My friends use them, and I use them. They work wonders for us.
Also, I would like to tell you how extremely satisfied I am with my McDonald's hamburger. Note, however, that I have not eaten, often, steak...
between sharp, TI, and casio (Score:5, Insightful)