Online calculator simulators?

[jonmoore]

(07-09-2022 06:16 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  I don't disagree but do recall that all of these machines are 30+ years newer, so it's not surprising that they eventually improved things. I still hold his contributions as unique, significant and insightful, and likely the very impetus for competitors to try harder. Of course the ever-dropping price of silicon made it somewhat easier by simply growing the CPU, memory, etc.

No dissing William Kahan's contributions to the world of numerical analysis in general, and post HP-45 to Voyager series calculators specifically intended. Without him, awareness of floating point precision issues in the nascent world of late seventies/early eighties computer science would not have been anywhere near as widespread. The point I was making was exactly the fact that things move on. It's a real pity that Dr Kahan wasn't involved in post Voyager HP calculator hardware.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/William_Kahan

@Albert, my bad, I should have shown the final value with NumberForm, 14.



Which is very close to the result given by both the TI machines.

I'm quite obviously a fan of HP calculators, but I do get annoyed by the evangelical tone that's often associated with opinions in the HP community. I remember the drubbing the TI 92, 98 & Voyage 200 got on the 48 mail-list back in the day, which was completely unfair because they werein fact more accurate than 48, 49 & 50, and up to the 50g, the Derive based CAS in the TI hardware was superior (even with Erable and ALG). I still prefer my RPL hardware by a country mile, but the TI 92 product line had the benefit that it was effectively Derive in calculator form (which was already finely tuned by the time the 92 came out). I like many run DOS Derive on my HP 200LX but I prefer the calculator translation as it has a far better UX for a handheld device.

I'm primarily a collector of computing devices. I never intended this, I just happen to be a terrible horder of tech I purchased from the 80's onward (I'm 10 years younger than the average hardcore HP collector), although I have purchased a few 70's examples where the price has been right.

The reason I prefer classic HP calculators to classic TI's is simply the fact that HP were pretty much the Apple of it's day in terms of marrying the best in industrial design with superior software engineering. My preference for RPL hardware is that I love the language. Emacs is my text editor of choice and has been for decades, and I've used Emacs Lisp for decades too (although these days I use Doom Emacs, which is Emacs but with VIM key bindings!) - with that in mind, RPL is actually pretty intuitive. However, I do love my Nspire and Voyage 200 for CAS workflows (which I often do with the kids). When I was studying, Derive was the main computer algebra system in the labs, so that's where the bias probably started.