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'Sound Engineers Hb 4e' - SlideRule - 09-13-2019 05:30 PM
"Calculators and Computers
In the late 1960s, I was invited to Hewlett Packard to view a new calculator they were planning to market. I was working at this time with Arthur C. Davis (not a relative) at Altec, and Art was a friend of William Hewlett. Art had purchased one of the very first RC oscillators made in the fabled HP garage. He had used them for the audio gear that he had designed for the movie—Fantasia.
The 9100 calculator– computer was the first brainchild that Tom Osborne took to HP, after having been turned down by SCM, IBM, Friden and Monroe. (I purchased one; it cost me $5100. I used it to program the first acoustic design programs.) In 1966, a friend introduced Osborne to Barney Oliver at HP. After reviewing the design he asked Osborne to come back the next day to meet Dave and Bill, to which Osborne said, 'Who?' After one meeting with 'Dave & Bill,' Osborne knew he had found a home for his 9100. Soon Bill Hewlett turned to Tom Osborne, Dave Cochran, and Tom Whitney, who worked under the direction of Barney Oliver, and said, 'I want one in a tenth the volume (the 9100 was IBM typewriter size), ten times as fast, and at a tenth of the price.' Later he added that he 'wanted it to be a shirt pocket machine.'
The first HP 35 cost $395, was 3.2 × 5.8 × 1.3 inches and weighed 9 oz with batteries. It also fit into Bill Hewlett’s shirt pocket. (Bill Hewlett named the calculator the HP 35 because it had 35 keys.) Art Davis took me to lunch one day with Mr. Hewlett. Because I had been an ardent user of the HP 9100 units, I was selected to preview the HP 35 during its initial tests in Palo Alto.
In my mind, these calculators revolutionized audio education, especially for those without advanced university educations. The ability to quickly and accurately work with logarithm, trigonometric functions, complex numbers, etc., freed us from the tyranny of books of tables, slide rules, and carefully hoarded volumes such as Massa’s acoustic design charts and Vegas’s ten place log tables.
For the multitude of us who had experienced difficulty in engineering courses with misplaced decimal points and slide rule manipulation and extrapolation, the HP 35 released inherent talents we didn’t realize we possessed. The x^y key allowed instant K numbers. The ten-place log tables became historical artifacts.
When I suggested to the then president of Altec that we should negotiate being the one to sell the HP 35s to the electronics industry (Altec then owned Allied Radio,) his reply stunned me, 'We are not in the calculator business.' I thought as he said it, 'Neither is Hewlett Packard.' His decision made it easy for me to consider leaving Altec.
I soon left Altec and started Synergetic Audio Concepts, teaching seminars in audio education. I gave each person attending a seminar an HP 35 to use during the 3-day seminar. I know that many of those attending immediately purchased an HP calculator, which changed their whole approach to audio system design. As Tom Osborne wrote, 'The HP 35 and HP 65 changed the world we live in.
Since the political demise of the Soviet Union, 'Mozarts-without-a-piano' have been freed to express their brilliance. Dr. Wolfgang Ahnert, from former East Germany, was enabled to use his mathematical skills with matching computer tools to dominate the audio-acoustic design market place."
BEST!
SlideRule
RE: 'Sound Engineers Hb 4e' - John Keith - 09-13-2019 07:25 PM
Neat, but what is the text from and who is it written by (if known)?
RE: 'Sound Engineers Hb 4e' - SlideRule - 09-13-2019 07:33 PM
Handbook for Sound Engineers, fourth Edition, Glen Ballou, Focal Press (2008)
Chapter 1
Audio and Acoustic DNA—Do You Know Your Audio and Acoustic Ancestors?
by Don and Carolyn Davis (pgs. 3-20)
Calculators and Computers (pgs. 18-19)
BEST!
SlideRule
RE: 'Sound Engineers Hb 4e' - John Keith - 09-14-2019 12:34 AM
Thanks, some interesting history there.
RE: 'Sound Engineers Hb 4e' - Archilog - 09-14-2019 12:36 PM
Many thanks, I appreciated each line of this text.