Enter vs. =

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Maximilian:

(09-20-2018 05:24 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  But that rarely is a case of choice. If you simply can't afford the expensive tool there is no way you can have it. As simple as that. Especially when students are concerned who often live on a very tight budget.

Absolutely. When I was in my 18-22's I had to work all kinds of jobs just to be able to acquire my very first HP, the wonderful HP-25 (no "C" yet), which was extremely expensive for me and required a lot of personal sacrifices to gather the money.

Afterwards I set my goals on acquiring the newly released HP-67 (still no "C" but with mag cards) and it was so expensive that I was forced to sell my beloved HP-25 secondhand to be able to raise the money for the HP-67, which took me almost a year of painfully saving every cent, every cent.

Then the HP-41C (at last a "C" !) hit the market and, again, I was forced to sell my wonderful HP-67 (which I sorely regret to this day) in order to acquire the barebones HP-41C. It was wonderful but very limited in RAM (many of my best HP-67 programs wouldn't fit/work), thus back to the sacrifices to get the money to acquire a RAM module and the, again, tremendously expensive but utterly essential card reader. The printer or the tape drive or other accessories were completely out of the question no matter what.

So you're right, HP was extremely expensive to the point were most students couldn't afford any of it and/or had to sacrifice most everything to be able to buy something HP. For me, it was the only option as I couldn't stand TI AOS at all, let alone the much inferior TI hardware. It was "HP or bust !" and it came uncomfortably close to the latter.

Those were the days, and they were excruciatingly hard.

Regards.
V.
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