HP 12C English Calculator
hp.com
hp.com
1. "Communicate information without taking the user out of their environment or task". The display shows a single number: either the answer to your question or your current input. I don't need to worry about running out of battery or charging it, as I only need to once every few years. I don't need to think about my 12C except when I need to answer a finance question. I don't need to turn it off "correctly", I just turn it off.
2. "Gives people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more". Basic math plus special purpose finance functions. No notifications, input history, cloud saves, Share button, upsells, political statements or otherwise claim they're making the world better, achievements or pretty but functionless UI.
3. "Moves easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back". When I'm discussing a scenario, I don't need to sit down at a computer and design a spreadsheet. The functions in 12C are concise and operate quickly, showing the answer to one question at a time.
4. "Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity". 12C doesn't use ML to guess poorly what the user is trying to do, suggesting autocompletes and "are you sure" or "you mean...". It respects that the user knows what they're doing.
5. "Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak". The display on 12C is minimal but shows everything you _need_ to know: the single number in front of you.
6. "Technology should work even when it fails". It either works or doesn't, no incorrect numbers reported, no missing functionality. Even when the battery dies, it will give me ample opportunity to do something about it before it actually happens, as the display dims gradually over weeks.
7. "The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem".
8. "Technology should respect social norms". The 12C can be at the center of a conversation, and even help move a conversation forward by answering questions; I don't need to bury my face in a laptop while talking with someone, so it doesn't look like I'm ignoring them or that I've shifted my attention elsewhere; while I'm typing in numbers, it's obvious they're the numbers we're talking about. It respects the norms/customs of the field their customers work in: no need to type enter formulas for PV, FV, IRR.
* Requires virtually no system administration.
It seems like every other piece of technology needs some setup, backups, periodic updates, or fiddling when something inevitably goes wrong.
If I’m not mistaken the 12C doesn’t have a clock. Thus, it doesn’t need to be updated 2x a year for Daylight (Summer) time, nor to have its time zone tables updated. It doesn’t need a clock; there are plenty of other ways for me to find the time, thank you. Not having a clock is a feature! Too many devices have a clock that cannot be disabled. A clock that is set wrong is worse than no clock at all. Thus, a device with an unnecessary clock demands my periodic attention to ensure the clock is set correctly.
About the only system administration necessary for the 12C is to replace the batteries. The batteries last for a very long time. As noted above, the 12C operates for a long time in a low battery condition, so you can choose to change the batteries when it’s convenient to do so.
Sure, it’s totally anachronistic but the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.
The 12C is used because it can directly calculate present value, which is an integral over an interest rate. That's a non-trivial calculation that everyone who deals with the time value of money needs.
But then, the life and blood of the global financial system runs on Excel, so I'm not sure why I would be surprised by this.
In retrospect, we should have gotten them addicted to Lisp machines and Silicon Graphics workstations ;-)
They are the two I use most frequently, but I don't think they are popular outside our niche.
It kills me to see programmers on Windows using Notepad++.
It kills me to see programmers on Windows using Notepad.
The interesting thing is that they do what they do well, "boot" instantly, and can be carried in the pocket. When a company I was with was being acquired pretty much every one of the auditors had one of these in their pocket. They knew exactly what sequence of presses would answer the question they needed answer.
Sometimes I fire up my Microsoft Natural keyboard. Right now it's the Sun PC keyboard's shift. Next in rotation is the Unix flavor.
Many lawyers in America still use WordPerfect, and I suspect Corel still makes and updates it for that reason :-)
I've heard from WordPerfect fans that it gives much more precise and reliable control over formatting than Microsoft Word, very important for picky court clerks and judges. WordPerfect also has a "reveal formatting codes" function, the equivalent of showing the HTML tags or Markdown syntax in line with the formatted result.
I haven't used WordPerfect in years, not since some WYSIWYG version for DOS (6?), so I don't have a personal opinion on whether it still deserves its popularity today.
IIRC, that's because Word can't do footnotes (or something like that) the way lawyers need to do them, but WordPerfect can.
The only court I know that is truly finicky about formatting is the US Supreme Court, but they have sensible rules, like requiring Century, and book-width lines for actual readability.
Are those rules published somewhere?
They should make a calculator that works with English natural language numbers:
compute eight plus four
twelveUseful when doing embedded programming, it's great at duplicating the behavior of actual machine instructions. Buttons for things like and, or, xor, not, shift, etc. You set your word size, then poke through calculations and get the same overflow/carry behavior, even with offbeat representations like 7 bit 2's complement.
You can put it into a human-compatible fixed point mode to do normal math. It's fine for some things that way, but no exponents or trig or scientific notation, barely more than 4 function really.
Many of the newer RPN HP calculators include these functions, however all the computer math things are done with multi-button soft key presses or menu selections instead of dedicated buttons.
I also have a TI Programmer. Inferior from a practical point of view, as it has many fewer functions. But it's fun to play with as it has one of those early red LED displays.