the worst?

[Steve Simpkin]

Regarding the HP-28C and it’s small 2K of RAM. Bill Wickes was the R&D project manager for the HP-28 and HP-48 series calculators. Around 1986 when Bill proposed designing a new advanced graphing scientific calculator with algebra capabilities, there was no budget available to develop an entirely new calculator like Bill wanted to do. Bill's choice was to either use the existing hardware of the HP-18C with its limited 2K of RAM (along with more ROM) or gamble and wait sometime in the future to see if management would approve a development budget for the hardware he really wanted to develop (basically the HP-48SX). No one at HP was certain how much of a market there was for an advanced scientific graphing calculator with algebra capabilities. HP allowed the team to test the marketplace using the already developed HP-18C hardware. When the HP-28C turned out to be a huge hit, they approved the budget needed for the HP-28S and then for the HP-48SX. I had each of them shortly after they came out and am still using my HP-48SX.