fed up with prime

[Tim Wessman]

(05-30-2014 11:42 AM)fablab48 Wrote:  please go urgently to the nursing home and ask help from the HP48 team, you are not at level (hardware and software)

Hello,

There are quite a few factors at play here that I think might be relevant.

Modern hardware/software is quite different then that from 15 years ago - let alone 30. It used to be such as in the time of the 28/48 creation that it was possible for a single user to understand the entire system from end to end. Unfortunately, that just isn't possible anymore.

For example, most chips come with a built in flashing mechanism of some kind. How exactly does that work? What are potential bugs or difficulty in there? There is no way to know that out or discover that because the chip manufacturer doesn't give that information out. If a problem is found, who exactly can you talk to?

Then you have the LCD/touchscreen, which has its own firmware that is created by the LCD manufacturer. There will be 0 visibility there and it is expected to work as a black box to deliver data back... except when it doesn't work as expected.

Then you have the OS for the chip. Usually, this will be a choice or one or possibly two supported OS implementations. If you move outside of that, all support is no longer given as they just won't support anything not on the approved list.

Then you often ( but not always ) have some firmware inside the charging circuitry. That is usually quite reliable, yet not always. How many major phone/electronics manufacturers have pulled or had to release updated software to address "power/charging issues" just within the last year or two? The complain of "my battery life is draining quickly" sure seems to be heard quite a bit in my opinion every time there is a new phone revision out...

We haven't even gotten to the calculator part of things yet, but there are already 4-5 different components that have to be working perfectly else unexpected things will happen. Sublte, tiny differences in behavior can be triggered that were completely unknown by completely innocuous changes.

Compare that with the 48. You have a custom designed chip for a specific purpose. The chip was designed to work exactly with 1 specific memory chip. The LCD was purely an on/off per pixel mapped directly to a memory location by the chip. In order to do anything, they worked directly with the designers of the chip to do things exactly as was intended with no in-between layers.

This whole stack was comprehensible to a single individual. Modern systems simply aren't. One person cannot possibly understand *exactly* what is going on in a windows program, android program, etc. You can have a rough idea, but the details are often what catches you.

I say this now not in an attempt to shift blame, or to argue that your concerns are invalid - they aren't. However, the complexity of modern systems is to the point now where you have to depends on many different pieces provided by many different sources. The complexity is at least an order of magnitude higher then it was before. Stupid bugs are just much easier to miss when there is more around them.

I spent a long time talking with Jim Donnelly last year. He was extremely impressed with Prime, and said that we were doing things they had only dreamed about doing back when the 48 was in development.

Is it perfect? Nope. Is it getting there? I think so. (well... maybe never perfect )