50g

I'm reading again William C Wickes book "HP48 Insights". It's a great read for anyone with a scientific bent- he was one of the designers of the original HP48 and the manual is written quite differently from the standard HP manual. It got me thinking about the role of the calculator in the modern era. When the HP35 came out, there were no PCs, and the calculator was a real enabling technology for engineers. Suddenly calculating logs, sines and so forth was easy whereas previously it had been a matter of slide rules, tables and the earlier apparatus of computation.

The HP41 was another big milestone in computation. In the book he goes into how the programming language in the HP48 (and earlier HP28) evolved; the problems they were trying to solve and in many ways succeeded in solving.

In another way the HP48 is a victim of its own magnificence; there are at least three ways to do a relatively simple program; you can use the stack with one set of functions; you can write in RPN, or you can write alphanumerically in speech marks and use the "eval" button to evaluate the text.

All of which is extremely confusing for a beginner (I certainly found this) but it could be a great thing for an expert. But when you have a PC on your desk, with a decent calculator on it, do you really need a handheld calculator at all?

Well most engineers I know have a calculator. It still seems to have a place. And the incredible $10 scientific calculators do most of what is needed; they even show your calculations in semi-graphical form nowadays.

The problem is that the calculator is now competing with Excel, and nearly everyone has a copy of Excel on their desktop not far away. But it looks like HP are trying to find a winning product; they have a new product with wifi and colour displays which looks very interesting.

But the HP48 series has something special; it can do some incredible things, like integration and differentiation and solving simultaneous equations. I guess the question is whether the user can harness the power of the calculator (at least this user!). Beneath its slightly forbidding exterior and 2300 functions lies a great computational elegance which only really becomes apparent when the philosophy behind its design is explained in Mr Wickes' book.

I bought it at a time when I was thinking of buying Mathcad, and that is the real competition, PC based programs such as these on the PC. Maybe if it could be made easier to connect to a PC then a calculator can again be a force in the market?

The new 'hp prime' is supposed to do everything the -48 did and then some (although it appears that time based alarms and beeping capabilities are missing -- don't know yet for sure, I only got my new calculator yesterday and still have to explore it).

That said, the one thing that such calculators have over a PC (or even a much more portable tablet of smart phone for which spreadsheet applications are available) is the power of programmability. While one can conceivably do fairly neat stuff with a spreadsheet, the fact remains that most of the actual functionality of a 'program' is hidden in the non-displayed content of the cell, which shows only the result unless it is accessed for edition (and in which case only that cell working logic is shown). This makes spreadsheet awkward for some applications; one thing I like to do with my programs is have them prompt me for the next entry which may vary as a function of the earlier inputs, with a spreadsheet, one essentially has to have all the pertinent inputs figured out from the launch.

What the calculator like the hp-48 (and hopefully the hp prime as well) offer is the convenient access to code development of an intermediate degree. For very complex programs, calculators are out of the game, but so are spreadsheet anyway; this is the realm of code development with IDE and compiler. If the hp prime can prove as developer friendly as the old 48 was (and boy, did I love that machine; unfortunately, it started having display issues that appeared well after the time where those were covered, and I had to get a hp-50 which I never got really into, since it does lack the all important double width ENTER button, which is a sign that RPN was not considered the main approach during design...)

The hp-48 and earlier calculators were seemingly designed by engineers who asked themselves "what you I like to have and use functionally?", and were thus designed with a passionate vision. To me, it seems the hp-49 (and the hp-50 which is a debugged 49) were more "let's try to meet the competition on their terms", which may have an impact on college students, but would, to a degree, alienate the "hp purists". And I do hope that the 'hp prime' is a step towards restoring that good old excellence in design.

CBVG