HP 10g

[Joseph_21sv]

HP released a 9s scientific calculator more or less in tandem with the 9g graphing calculator, that being a clone of the Casio fx-6000G series. However, there has not yet been a 10g graphing calculator to go along with the 10s(+). Did HP ever even plan such a calculator? If not, what, if any, was the reasoning behind this? If so, why would HP have "forgotten" about that plan and what might have been in it?
For my part, I suspect HP did have a plan that was "forgotten" because the Marketing department thought it was a calculator that too few people would care to buy from them or didn't understand that a bizarre design was only a draft. Maybe it was intended just to be a 9g that supported entering lowercase letters and had double memory space (800 steps of formula plus A-Z, a-z and 66 array memories exchangeable for 12 extra steps each). However, its firmware was inexplicably initially drafted for a hybrid display that could display formulae as one sees them presented in textbooks and a marketing executive misunderstood this as the production design and suggested the project to be axed because the design looked too strange to be profitable.
What do you all think about this?

[Jake Schwartz]

(09-12-2015 06:11 PM)Joseph_21sv Wrote:  HP released a 9s scientific calculator more or less in tandem with the 9g graphing calculator, that being a clone of the Casio fx-6000G series. However, there has not yet been a 10g graphing calculator to go along with the 10s(+). Did HP ever even plan such a calculator? If not, what, if any, was the reasoning behind this? If so, why would HP have "forgotten" about that plan and what might have been in it?

Here is my two cents: As you indicated, the 9s and 9g were basically similar to other manufacturers' machines, and therefore I believe that HP had not "designed" these machines in their own R&D facilities; but purchased another manufacturer's designs and labelled them as their own, releasing them on Jan 23, 2003. (Clearly, they don't resemble anything else HP had done before or since, with the exception of the 30s, released three years earlier on April 7, 2000; and the 30s succeeded the 6s and 6s Solar units form April of 1999.) I believe that the 10s (released on Sept 4, 2007) was a "refreshed" version of the 8s (released 1/1/2006) and probably had nothing to do with the 9s or 9g from four years earlier. To me, the whole time period from 1999 to 2007 seemed like a turbulent time at HP where they were attempting to gain some sort of a foothold on the low-end scientific market some way. Yes, the 33S (from 2004 and the 35s (from 2007) were also happening during this time, but these two units were more costly and complex and represented more of a "mid-line" scientific range.

Jake

[Joseph_21sv]

Whether the 9s and 10s have anything to do with each other is beside my point. My point is that the 10s, being able to memorize entire "straightforward" calculations, is in a range slightly above the 9s, and as there was apparently turbulence at HP between 1999 and 2007 (when the 9s, 9g, 33s, 8s, 10s and 35s happened), a proposed calculator in a range slightly above the 9g (which would have been released as the 10g) might have gotten lost in this turbulence. As this proposal, if it exists, is definitely lost, one can only suppose exactly what it was, and Heaven knows, maybe the initially proposed display was in fact the 9g display enlarged so that it supported displaying formulae as they appear in textbooks (and also showing X and Y coordinates simultaneously during graph tracing). Moreover, the complete non-programmability of the 9s and the trivial programming model of the 8s/10s mark these, for people who know HP's reputation as the "Programmable calculator company", as calculators for which the HP mark is unbecoming.