Online calculator simulators?

[Steve Simpkin]

(07-09-2022 07:22 PM)jonmoore Wrote:  ...
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.
...

Dr. Kahan blames HP marketing for that.

"The HP 12C was successful enough that they were willing to take my advice about building the 15C, but not take my advice about how many to build. They wanted a third of my figure, and Harms did half again what they wanted, and that’s what they were doing. They were producing half of my number. The marketing people had a third of my number. I shouldn’t have said a half. The marketing people had a third of my number, and Harms ended up with the production line producing half of my target number, and then these calculators were disappearing off the shelves as fast as they could be supplied. MIT, for example, for a couple of years was telling its freshmen that they should buy the calculator, and it had a special deal with HP that would get them involved in a somewhat lower price.
HAIGH: What year did the calculator appear?
KAHAN: I think it was 1982, give or take. We could probably look at the manuals and find out exactly when it appeared. Well, HP never produced an advertisement for the 15C in its own right in any Western language. It might have had advertisements that listed the 15C and the 16C and the 11C and so on, but never for the 15C in its own right except for one in Japanese. I saw an advertisement in Japanese. They were selling them by word of mouth as fast as they could produce them, and when my friends and I who had worked on this went to the marketing people and tried to persuade them, “Look, set up another production line, because you want to gather your flowers while you may,” they said, “No, if we set up another production line, we may end up with inventory after all. You know how sales go. The sales rise to a peak and then they go down,” and these guys thought that they must be hitting the peak. They weren’t hitting a peak. They were hitting a ceiling. It’s a different thing. So they never did set up another production line. In consequence, the market was starved. There were waiting lists, and that window closed, and so I never did get the calculators into the hands of sufficiently many students to change the ways in which professors would issue assignments, and that was a bitter disappointment. It colored my relations with this particular group at HP. I continued to work with them for a couple of years, but my heart just wasn’t in it anymore."