The HP-35
codex99.com
codex99.com
Often because "that's not the business we're in". Kodak was a photographic film company, not a photography company.
These calculators look a bit clunky and retro today compared to modern phones, but they were unbelievably futuristic in the mid-70s.
The idea that you could have a programmable microcomputer in your pocket which could load applications from plastic cards was jaw-dropping.
It's not, the Mathatronics Mathatron was sold nearly a year before the Programma 101: https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/c-math8-48m.html
There is a modern reboot of this, the HP-35s, LCD display but the same curved case.
Individuals themselves possess brilliance, there are good MBAs as much as there are bad MBAs and the same for STEM professionals.
Rather we should say Hewlett had exceptional insight at the time, vs. attributing it to his upbringing and then making a sweeping statement on MBAs coming through a finance department.
Tim Cook has an MBA. No one could complain about Apple's financial performance, but the company has definitely lost the "Let's launch a market-defining product every five years or so" momentum and gloss of the Jobs years.
It's an open question whether this would actually have harmed Apple's performance over time, or whether the market cap would be even bigger if Jobs were still alive. (IMO it would probably have led to a much broader and more inventive product range which would have triggered earlier antitrust action - but of course that's just speculation and there's no possible way to back it up.)
And many would say the M1 and Silicon Macs are a considerable step up, and so is the slow but steady March of wearables via Apple Watch and Air Pods.
I do agree with you that there is a higher chance of innovation with Steve at the helm, but again he is a generational talent so is it fair to paint the MBA Tim Cook in a bad light when he has been reasonably successful in not just business but also innovation.
My overall point is smart people are smart people and generational talents are generational talents. They can be MBAs or engineers or any other profession. Creative MBAs will be creative and dull engineer will be dull.
An engineer who lives across the street from the CEO and carpools with him. Not so common anymore, though I seem to recall that Java started with an engineer who played hockey with Scott McNealy.
The CEO having a consulting company do a market survey and the deciding "ah, whatever, I want one of these, let's go ahead".
I think especially the latter story seems typical for Hewlett, in that he was neither a by-the-book corporate drone, nor an utterly reckless damn-the-torpedoes type, but somebody who was willing to trust his instincts and take calculated risks at times.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/how-steve-jobs-cold-called-h...
Note: Steve Jobs, employed as a "technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs" even sold as his the improvement of the hardware implementation of the Pong successor bringing Wozniak to "help" him:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
Jobs started his career with working on the pure hardware. Later, he had many opportunities to learn about all hardware and software aspects of the projects he lead.
Here's a bug list tracker: https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/articles.c...
I recall writing "programs" that performed some of the calcs I needed in the physics curriculum. I also recall being amused that I could calculate 1/3 (or 1/7) and add it to itself until I got (nearly) 1. From there this led me to study what fixed and floating point were, and think about the implications for the code I was writing (precision, truncation/roundoff error, etc.) to do longer calcs.
This eventually led me to skipping a postdoc, and working in the high performance computing industry. Where I am today.
They were/are awesome tools.
But calculators were dropping quickly in price and a couple of years later I was able to pick up a discontinued HP-55 which I used for years until I picked up an HP-41CV with financial pac for going off to business school. (I probably had one of the horizontal format HP RPN calculators somewhere in there too.)
That said, I've had recent occasion to do some programming for celestial navigation on a handheld- and the TI is a lot easier to use for that.
There's a good HP-42 app as well although I'm just more used to the 41 so that's what I use.
One of the more interesting accessories was his special HP-35 hardcore looking security lock. You would securely bolt the base of the lock to your desk, place the HP-35 inside, and connect and lock the cover with a key. Precious device back then!
The article may not make it clear how many efforts were going on in that timeframe to manufacture calculators. The first electronic calculator I saw at MIT was a desktop system by Wang; it had a Nixie tube display, see [1,2,3].
The first handheld calculator I ever came into contact with was in 1971 when I saw a student with a Bowmar Brain.
[1] https://peoplaid.com/2020/08/12/the-story-of-an-wang-develop...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube
[4] http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/bowmar_calculators.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
If one wants to try out on an android mobile go to:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48
or
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.emulator.f...
(Amps etc. would be another example if you stick to purely analog inputs, but that's not digital.)
I did NOT write this code; but you might want to View Source to see the JS that implements it, as it's clean, lean, and easy to understand.
Right about the time IBM came up with their PC-AT (16-bit 80286, 10MB hard disk, yes: MB) HP came out with their version, same price, same specs, name started with a "V".
Over the course of the following year, each and every hard disk in every PC-AT failed. IF and ONLY IF you had paid $200 extra for a service contract (about the price of the drive) then, WHEN it failed, you could pack up and drive your PC-AT to whichever city had the nearest IBM service office, and they would replace the disk while you waited. Sorry about your data.
The HPs came with disk drives that didn't fail.
Guess which company ended up with the better reputation -- for "excellent service".
It is said the failed drives (made by Conner, IIRC) became an artificial reef offshore of Boca Raton.
The YouTube channel of "Professor Herning" has some good videos if one is curious on slide rules:
* https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorHerning/videos
Both their use:
* https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorHerning/playlists
and comparisons between different models. There's a still lively trade for them on eBay that seems to go on for aficionados and the curious.
He managed to get a demonstrator from the local office of HP, for iirc CAD$695, which was a lot of money in those days.
I would push a few number keys and the log button, and, like magic, 10 significant figures. Beyond magic.
The other mystery was this: on the label at the bottom on the reverse side, it said "Made in Singapore".
To me, in the early 1970s Canada, that was as mysterious a place as you could imagine.
(I'm sure it was assembled there, not manufactured, but still.)
Here is a nice explanation (PDF): https://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DMNS/Faculty%20Doc...
EDIT: in the HP-35 article it is mentioned in section III. The PDF here goes in to the math and implementation of CORDIC.
Were they just being cute or is there some mathematical basis to these numbers being used to price things?
Link:
https://apps.apple.com/ae/app/rpn-30/id1451413517
Reviews:
https://appgrooves.com/ios/1451413517/rpn-30/ashok-khanna/po...
Note: I am the Author, but this is not spammy, I already have 10,000 users and don’t charge for it anyway :)
That said, I’ve never become comfortable with RPN.
Thing is I only do basic calculations with RPN, I can see how it may be jarring for scientific calculations or longer multi form ones (although there are many who are very comfortable and prefer this mode of entry).
and iOS 13+ :-/
I refactored it to Swift UI but Apple didn’t provide backwards comparability for old iOS, which I didn’t know until it’s too late. There’s nothing that special in Swift UI that forces it to be 13+, but that’s life
The Swiss Micro calculators are tempting but I know I'd just be indulging in nostalgia. I have zero need for anything beyond my iPhone app and a couple of HP-1x series landscape format models.
From the 1970s until the late 1990s, HP's calculators were renowned for their build quality, similar to how IBM ThinkPads were renowned for their quality. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some high-quality calculators such as the HP-32SII and HP-48GX were replaced by calculators like the HP-33S and HP-49G, respectively, that did not have the same build quality. This led to HP's older calculators being sold on eBay and other secondhand markets at high prices. (Thankfully HP's calculator quality would improve in the late 2000s with the HP-35S and HP-50g.)
I've heard similar things about HP's printers and personal computers; there is a discernible difference in quality between those built before the late 1990s and those built afterwards.
Until information about the brand’s changes in quality pervade the market, the sellers can pocket the extra profit from lowered costs.
I guess the counter-argument is to claim that the market for the original quality was going away. This does happen, too: the first-mover can essentially spend monopoly profits on making something which makes engineers happy, if they choose to. But as competitors catch up, customers start to vote with their wallets for the minimum usable quality. The early leader may choose to sell the same low-quality items and charge 20% extra for their name, but they can't choose to sell the high-quality items at 3x the price, if there are no buyers.
Again this is the MBA mindset, a company’s assets, of which the goodwill of its customers is one, are to be stripmined for personal gain, then they move onto the next company like locusts.
Another factor that could have led to the demise of HP calculators was Texas Instruments' partnerships with textbook companies. When I was in high school, many textbooks had TI-83 examples and exercises. My impression is that HP's calculators were marketed to college students and engineers, while TI marketed its calculators to the much more lucrative middle and high school market. Thus turned out to be a winning strategy for Texas Instruments.
As a computer scientist/software engineer, I seldom use handheld calculators anymore. I use the Unix dc command whenever I need to make quick calculations, and I have LibreOffice Calc, GNU Octane, and REPLs available (such as Python and Common Lisp) whenever I need to perform more complex calculations. If I must calculate something away from my computer, I can use my iPhone's calculator app. I would imagine that this killed the traditional market for HP calculators; why spend the money on a bespoke handheld calculator when most engineers have access to computers and smartphones?
However, in a classroom setting I wouldn't be allowed to use my iPhone. Texas Instruments did a good job courting the classroom and standardized test markets. HP might have figured that it didn't want to compete against TI in this market.
With that being said, I wish I didn't miss out on the HP-15c special edition that was on sale briefly in 2011; I didn't hear any announcements until it was already sold out.
When I was in high school virtually everyone had a TI calculator but I couldn't afford one. At college we were required to own an HP-48. I don't recall paying $500 for it, but maybe I did and I just forgot. It doesn't seem like the kind of money I would have had at that time. I still have it and it still works perfectly, which puts it in league with my Tektronix analog oscilloscopes in terms of legendary durability.
In engineering school, the HP-28, -42 and the new -48 series calculators where dominant. The build quality and "feel" were great. I don't even know if there was an equivalent TI model at the time.
I wonder if this can be avoided or mitigated by creating a subsidiary or sub-brand to differentiate between the high-end and high-volume. Something like Toyota/Lexus, VW/Audi, etc.
This is what happens when you let accountants make business decisions. I'm sure it looked like a real golden opportunity at the time. But what it actually did was kill the home printer business --- or at least most of it. Now, most home printers aren't worth having.
At that time injket was doing so obscenely well that a lot of mistakes were paid for and papered over from those profits.
I joined right around that time, a few months before Carly was hired as CEO. She was okay at first but got worse and when she left we were singing "ding dong the witch is dead", you could actually hear it throughout the entire floor I was working on. Unfortunately, the CEOs up to Meg were a total disaster, I think with Meg the recovery started and now, after spinning off HPE it's been a super-fun place to work at again.
Despite all the bad press there's actually a ton of interesting R&D going on still but the consumer doesn't really hear about it. It's a deal with the devil when you switch from selling to nerds to grumpy consumers around the world.