The Tablet and the Calculator
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The internals have changed, now running some kind of ARM emulator inside, but I have one from the '80s and another from 2012, and they operate identically. There are some superficial differences, but you could give a modern one to a user in 1985 and they'd be right at home.
The Wall Street Journal wrote a nice retrospective of the HP12c for its 30th anniversary in 2011: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487038419045762574...
The HP48 was an amazing calculator for engineers. It often sells on Ebay for more than HP's current highest-end calculators do brand new.
The problem is that HP's calculator division originally knew that calculators were about accuracy--both numerically, the algorithms were specified and stable, and physically, the keys simply never made an error and had a positive physical feel when they engaged.
I could enter long semiconductor device physics calculations into my HP48SX and not even look at the display. I would know that everything was entered correctly simply by feel.
I can't even hope to do that on anything "modern".
These days I tend to use the Droid48 emulator (one of my favorite apps) on my Android. It lacks the tactile feel, obviously, but makes up for it by being always in my pocket -- similar to phone cameras vs. good dedicated cameras.
The TI can do integration, complex arithmetic, vectors, and matrices. However, most of it's functions don't work in the complex domain, and the matrices are limited to 3×3. It has a solver, but that's limited. It can't store equations or programs.
The HP can also do integration, complex arithmetic, vectors, and matrices. Almost all of its functions work in the complex domain (complex matrices are particularly useful). It has a versatile solver, works with matrices of over 10 elements, and can even store user programs (with GUI elements!).
My theory on what happened is that normal desktop computers became powerful enough to run mathematical software packages, and graphing calculators became popular. Those two things dis-incentivized calculator manufacturers from creating powerful scientific calculators that could ACTUALLY fit in a pocket.
The calculator now exists just for highschool students, which is a shame, because it would be really nice to have a powerful scientific with nice buttons.
Maybe someone will build a calculator that also serves as an interface with a mathematics package… maybe even with "cloud" computing capabilities (where it runs the software package on your computer to do non-trivial things.
I'm still using the 28S I bought back in the late '80s (also bought a spare recently), it does what I need, displays four levels of the stack, and between the quality buttons and discipline in double checking the stack before doing operations I never made a calculation error in my problem sets. Any keying error were due to hitting the wrong key, not the keys themselves.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to switch to a 35s because I read it has a stack of only 4 levels. I find it very useful for summing a long list of numbers to key them all in, and then double check against the list as I do each addition. Hmmm, it's also easier to keep track of where you are in that process with an extra 2 visible lines.
Never again.
Meanwhile my 41cv from 1982 is still going strong.
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-calculus-bc/c...
(Especially considering they don't clear memory, and one can install a full Debian distribution on the Nspire CX...)
There has to be (or where) literally millions of buyers for this kind of thing. The k-12 training pipeline is the perfect way to lock people into the "TI-way" of calculating.
(and yes I know you can install Octave and Matlab on Android devices these days, but people turn to those because there isn't a TI licensed pro-level app. And yes, I have several TI-calc emulators on my phone I use frequently).
It’s even sillier when you consider most students have a dramatically more capable smartphone in their pockets already. We might as well be teaching students to use Palm Pilots or 15-year-old point-and-shoot digital cameras.
Calling them “pro level” is a joke.. real pros use (e.g.) Matlab, R, Mathematica, or Python.
For example, adding better support for matrix math than the TI-89/92 series, and some built in image processing tools...the platform already even has image acquisition hardware.
Or a line of USB connectable voltmeters or other data acquisition hardware.
For field use, lots of people still use these middle-school calculators because they have a decent combination of power and an interface they've been using for 6-7 years. Heck, I use emulators for TI-83/85/89 on my phone for quick calculations in the field or when I don't want to have to fire up an overpowered tool. The CAS on the 89 is almost magic in lots of cases.
Why would they, though? They sell their calculators by the bucketload, still charge more than $59.99, and since they're pretty much the same obsolete hardware they've been peddling for 20 years, it probably costs next to nothing to produce. What you're suggesting is more work (since they'd actually have to design something again, god forbid), they'd make less money, and it would just help people to realize what garbage they've been selling as gold for years. Once people started buying graphing calculator software for their phones, why would it have to be TI's?
I really hate TI as a company.