[PLUG-TALK] Re: [PLUG] Linux Financial Calculator

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> There's quite a story behind the not-so-humble HP12C. I don't remember all
> the details, but they can be had by searching the web. The main thread is
> that in the early-mid 1980s, HP made a number of calculators in that form
> factor. I forget all of them, but the three most popular were the HP12,
> HP15 and HP16. The HP12 did business calculations, as its successor the
> HP12C does today. The HP15 did engineering and scientific calculations,
> including the unheard-of at that time matrix and complex numbers. In
> addition, the same folks who designed IEEE floating point arithmetic did
> all of the numeric coding for it. The HP15 was an awesome tool. And the
> HP16 was for assembly language hex/octal/binary junkies -- if you spent
> your days poring over crash dumps, you had an HP16.

   In 1978 I bought a HP-67, the portable programmable calculator that stored
(and read) programs on little magnetic cards. The cost was more than $700
then. It was much more convenient than writing Fortran code for the HP-3000,
so I wrote a few dozen mathematical, statistical, and model programs for my
doctoral dissertation and post-doc research. When I needed to have a hard
copy, I ran the program on my advisor's HP-97, the printing version. I still
have it in my desk draw, along with the magnetic card collection and all the
manuals.

   About 15 years ago, I bought a 32S RPN/Scientific calculator, and I use
that for one-off calculations when I don't want to fire up ipython, or I'm
not at the computer.

   Say what you will about HP, I think their portable calculators and
printers are top of the line in quality and longevity. (However, I still see
many OkiData dot-matrix printers in retail stores, still going after a
quarter century.)

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
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