Video: TI-58 / PC-100

[Steve Simpkin]

(12-26-2021 03:55 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  

(12-25-2021 11:27 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I've got a TI-59 (with working card reader) and a PC-100 and it's a really nice setup, actually more powerful than the HP-97. Though arguably not as elegant! I'm still trying to track down an Electrical Engineering module...

I might be convinced to part with my own TI-58/59 EE module, but I keep thinking I ought to round up the whole set of TI-58c and 59, cards, modules, books, and printer, and eBay it. Although TI was not nearly as professional as HP, a nice thing about the modules' manuals is that they explained things better, rather than just assuming you knew the insides of functions well enough to teach them and you just needed to know how to use the calculator as a tool to speed up what you were already expert at.

That reminds me of something Dr. William Kahan said in an oral history he gave in 2005.

“But there was a Hewlett-Packard policy which said, “We are professionals, and we sell to professionals. We tell them what the device does, and they figure out how to use it. We’re not writing tutorial material in our manuals.” And I tried to explain, “Look—this time you’ve got to put some tutorial material in the manuals. You really must. Otherwise, folks are going to fool themselves.” Well, the managers wouldn’t do it, but I had persuaded Barkin, and I can’t remember the name of the other guy. It’s probably in there somewhere. There were two guys who were writing the manuals, and I persuaded them. I think persuasion is the wrong word. This was a case of subversion. I subverted them and got them to do something that their managers had told them not to do. The manual writers listened to my arguments and decided that I was right, and their managers were wrong. And that’s a dangerous decision, you know. You can get fired for that. They wrote the two extra chapters into the manual, which said something about the solve key and something about the integrate key, and a little bit to warn you. And I had written up some more stuff, which ultimately got into the Hewlett-Packard Journal. And the managers were outraged. They had said explicitly, “Don’t do that.” And now their guys had done it. And they said, “Take it out.” And they were told, remember, “If we take it out, it’ll delay the appearance to market.” You’ve heard that story before. That was it. The managers had just been blackmailed by time-to­market, so they left it in. Then afterwards, they did a survey, and they discovered that the customers loved this stuff. In fact, the customers would often say they had bought the calculator because they’d been told that there was advice in the manual about these problems, which was advice they actually needed not only for the calculator but also when they solved similar problems on the big machines. And so when I came up with these articles, they were perfectly happy to print them in the Hewlett­Packard Journal. I was told by the editors some years later that they had had more requests for reprints of these articles than for all their others put together. ”