"New-Yorke" ?

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

Here is what my memory tells me...
Note that we are talking about events that happened over 20 years ago... How reliable is memory after 20 years? I will try to add "qualifier" on various statements to give a "certitude level" for the various statements.

"New Yorke" as a project or a concept IS real. I heard about it when I joined the ACO (Australian Calculator Operation) in 1998. Since before joining the ACO I did not know about the "Yorke" chip (we did not have official HP data in France when I was younger, and we always refereed to the 48 CPU as the Saturn), I am prety damn sure that this memory is accurate....

Note: This project would have been started by the Corvalis team at a time when the Calculator group was part of the larger Singapore handheld group (Jordana and the like). The Singapore group did not having much interest in calculators (which where just added on top of their other stuff), so they did not do much about it, which is why the Corvalis group ended up being "discarded". Since silicon is long and expensive, it most likely explains why the project never made it pass the prototype stage.

New Yorke was definitely a project to speed up the CPU to 8Mhz (from the original 4Mhz). I remember that also with high certainty.

I have vague recollections actually seeing a 48 with said faster chip. BUT I would not swear to that memory. It might be just a figment of my imagination (or my wishes).
What I find disturbing in this memory is that, had we had such a calculator in our hands at the ACO, one of the 3 of us (Jean-Yves, Gerald or myself) would most likely have claimed it! and treasure it... Had I had it, I would most likely have unsolder the CPU and shoved it in my velvet black HP49G. I would have keept that chip in a special place and held on to it with all my geeky strength!
Jean-Yves might have been less inventive, but he definitely would have been very outspoken about it and showed it around a lot. I do not think that Gerald would have fought us for it, so I don't think that he would have ended up with it.
But I definitely do not have said calc and do not remember Jean-Yves having it. Which makes me think that it never made it to the ACO.
What might have happened is that it might have been in the hand of one of the Corvalis members (Jimm, Diana) who might have shown it to Jean-Yves, but not given it to him.
Hence I would have ended up with the knowledge of the existence, the project name a first hand account of the existence, but not the device itself.

I remember hearing that the main issue with the project was instability and low yields. This is also a relatively high certainty memory.

So, here you go, all the data that I can remember, "from the horse's mouth", for Wikipedia.

Add to this that the Arm based devices project names WERE based on my quirky, non-native English brain word association, makes the New Yorke part of calculator history, weather it actually made it past the design phase to prototype or not.

Cyrille de Brébisson, HP calculator engineer 1998-now (2020) <-- official signature and all for wikipedia!
Hope that helps!