The days of smiling quietly to myself when people asked to borrow it and ignored my warnings of “if you haven’t used one before you probably won’t be able to add 2 and 2″ are long gone, but this is easily the object I would miss most if it were to disappear off my desk.

HP calculators have only gone down hill since the late 90s. Sadly at the turn of the millennium HP decided it wasn’t worth the effort to do much product R&D anymore. To quote their director of supply chains in 1999: “We’ll let Intel do our hardware R&D, Microsoft will do our software R&D and we’ll own the supply chain”. HP Corvallis calculator operations had already been moved to Australia and not long after in 2001 the Australian operation was shutdown and the calculator division was moved to Singapore. At that point calculator design and manufacture was largely outsourced.

The result was the “return to the market mediocre” loss of RPN. Only market demand seems to have resulted in a grudging implementation in the latest versions. At this point you’d have to hold a gun to my head AND pay me to even accept possession of a new HP calculator, which is quite a reversal for someone who was an early and long-standing PPC member, 30-year user of HP calculators and 10-year veteran of HP itself! They are *so* bad. The sad part is they’ve lost the very thing that allowed the higher product margins which funded the features which locked-in engineering students and elite users who could afford the prices. Break the cycle and you have to compete with the dogs!

The best hope for having a revived 10-series is to look to non-HP sources - i.e. the enthusiasts and hackers. This community has historically been amazingly technical. Back in the day these folks “discovered” synthetic programming which is a back door into the HP41’s firmware. I was a hardcore synthetic programmer back in college. Several calculator enthusiast groups on the web have voiced a desire (and sort of started) attempts to create from scratch RPN/RPL calculators in the original HP spirit.

I think the biggest problem is they are probably biting off too much to both create the hardware and extend it. Reproducing an HP 15C with modern components without trying to go too far beyond is quite doable and probably with some impressive speed/power performance. A single current FPGAs could trivially implement the entire hardware of a 10-series which originally had several ICs (the original 10-series used an early form of surface mount).

It’s always about time however. For example I’ve completely reverse engineered and built HP-IL (calculator networking for the HP41, HP71, HP75) from the ground up with modern off-the-shelf components but I haven’t had time to do much with it let alone document and publish how to do it.

Thin. Elegant. Well built. RPN. Wonderful. When HP was still an electrical engineering company. The real HP is now Agilent.

My iMac has an RPN calculator.

A year later, at a little company called Intel, I could afford one–with my own money, that is. The HP 25 had just come out, at a more affordable $150-175. It was my constant pocket companion for a year. I taught myself statistics, for analyzing experiments (Student’s T, Poisson distribution, etc.) And RPN was utterly natural, allowing rapid-fire calculations.

By 1976 I decided to get an HP-67. Still my favorite for so many reasons. I practically wore out the keys doing calculations related to a chip problem we were having (alpha particles causing memory errors).

Later, I replaced it with an HP-41C, but it wasn’t noticeably better, and by then I had a home PC (a Processor Technology SOL), and minicomputers at work, and less need for doing lots of calculations, so the era of HP calculators faded a bit for me. I did get an HP 11C, for portability, then an HP 28S (hated it), and, finally, some variant of an HP 48.

Mostly I use the Mac’s calculator, set to RPN and Scientific mode, so it’s like some mutated version of HP calculators. Works pretty well.

I’m long gone from Intel, by the way, and now favor Haskell over either Mathematica (which I used for a while) or Lisp (ditto).

The iPhone looks interesting. Maybe when the 3G iPhone 2 hits the shelves, I’ll get one. And then rediscover the HP 15C?

–Tim

Being of slide rule vintage, I’ve had a lot of different calculators, including HP’s and TI’s that I programmed, over the years but the Sharp was one of the best for just getting the job done, PhD and all, pre-laptop.

http://www2.russbrooks.com:8080/2007/11/24/interesting-os-x-unix-discovery

The article has some good links to other legendary RPN machines and some classic pics. Enjoy!

My programming masterpiece for this device was an “animated” hailstone sequence, the *3+1 … /2 game. (excuse me, the 1 ENTER 3 * + …. 2 / game).

I’d much prefer if Wolfram somehow managed to get a version of Mathematica running on the iPhone

You can already run Mathematica from any location as follows. You buy one of these handheld computers with internet connection. Install VNC and log on to your PC at the office

Yeah, I know, the site is a joke. But it’s a crappy joke. End of rant.

Last week I was at the WIYN telescope and they had a couple of HPs on the desk for the observers’ use, which are probably older than the telescope.

The 15C was my second HP calculator - obtained after my HP35 died - they were both incredibly expensive by local standards which is why I (as an impoverished student & then engineer) sweated over each purchase decision - would it be the right one?

The 15C is still my constant companion - in the briefcase every night so that I always have it at work or home! Rock solid, robust, and only one battery change in 20+ years. Used every day at work as well.

I brought a 42S years later when the 15C was temporarily lost - wrong form factor, lightweight and fragile in comparison with the 15C. Gave it away to a colleague when I rediscovered the 15C. But it broke within a few years.