Top three calculators ?

[grsbanks]

It's hard to decide which my top 3 would be. It strikes me that there have been several really great machines that have been let down by something that mars them. I would list more than 3 here but have difficulty choosing just three from them. In no particular order:

HP-41CX: The HP-41C was groundbreaking for 1979. Slightly limited in memory capacity but nothing that a (Quad) memory module couldn't fix. The CV fixed that problem out of the box. When the 41CX was released, it was kind of what the 41C should have been. More memory than you could shake a stick at (for the day) with the Extended Func/Mem module built in, the Time Module built in, and carried over from the 41C/CV, a plethora of software packages, the ability to integrate into a lab or other workflow with HP-IL, convenience I/O such as the wand and peripherals coming out the wazoo. This must be the calculator that has aged the best. It and its peripherals are still sought after 4 decades later.

HP-71B: This for many of the same reasons as the HP-41CV. Adding a full QWERTY keyboard to the mix and the form factor, although it was less "pocketable" than the '41, made it sit well on a desk.

HP 48GX: Almost what the 48SX could have been. Aesthetically, the colour scheme was not the best and there was little improvement in the LCD over the 48SX. What it should have been is the innards of the 48GX but with the same colour scheme as the SX. The improved on-board memory, faster CPU and other features in the ROM lifted it above the SX.

HP-15C: One of the best all-round scientific programmables ever. Programmability, matrix calculus, complex numbers, built-in numerical integration and equation solver... All of this in a package the size of other machines that only had a fraction of the features. Great keyboard, batteries that last decades, very readable LCD. The only thing that let the 15C and other Voyagers down is the speed, or rather lack thereof. Even for the day, they weren't particularly fast.

HP 48gII/49g+/50g: Huh? The 48gII? I know, the keyboard was atrocious on the 2003 version but hear me out... The actual machines (the three mentioned here are essentially the same) were a good concept. Production of the Saturn CPU powering the 48GX and 49G was no longer possible so HP had to find an alternative. The decision was made to build an emulator so that the existing software base would not be made obsolete overnight and Kinpo came up with these machines running on an ARM chip. These things run UserRPL written for the 48 series with little to no change. They do so a lot faster than the 48 series, they have more features and they display their results on a far better screen. The things that let these machines down are the terrible keyboard of the 2003 HP 48gII (fixed with the 2007 version) and the bugs in the emulation layer (clock counting backwards sometimes, alarms not going off unless the calculator is powered on when they become due etc.)