The programmable calculator the HP-30b should have been

[Joseph_21sv]

But the 34s still has the weirdly-arranged hybrid display which is one of the other things I think the 30b shouldn’t have had. Moreover, aren’t numerical constants in 34s programs still unmerged? However, I do like the 926 steps of program storage that the 34s can be configured to have and that you do not need to use a menu to type letters on it. Even so, the real point of my complaint is that HP did not make the 30b the “Super 12c Platinum” that it could—and should in my opinion—have been, and not just in the area of programming capacity: It can store fewer cash flow groups—albeit with no limit on frequency—and statistical data points (insofar as I presume) than the 12c Platinum can and it needs to be programmed to do TVM calculations which are preprogrammed into 12c Platinum firmware. The horrible thing about the lame freak that HP made of what could have been a new classic business calculator is that it so clearly smacks of them not believing strongly enough in the existence of such an ideology as “progressive conservatism” to notice even the faintest whiff of it in the business community. Preprogrammed functionality being equal, assuming that HP did indeed want the calculator use a hybrid display, why didn’t they just put a full row of dot matrix like other hybrid display calculators? All such calculators other than the two-line TI-BAII+, although not intended for business calculations, have programmability at least just intelligent enough and at least just enough memory space (program steps plus data registers) that a clever enough user can find a way to teach them to do certain business calculations; so there is really no sound excuse HP could have had for arranging the 30b’s display so weirdly. Speaking of programmability, that of the 30b and that of the 17bII+ are roughly equally intelligent, the only real difference being that the 17bII+ has two orders of magnitude more program memory than the 30b does. I, however, am not trying to imply that the 30b should have been anywhere near like a keystroke-programmable 17bII+, but wouldn't it have been nice if the 30b could have consumed just one half-byte of program memory per digit written into programs and had just one quarter of an order of magnitude more cash flow/statistics storage than HP made it with? By my calculations; giving such a calculator a repurposed HP 32s series programming model, preprogramming it for odd period TVM and making alphabetic letters accessible directly from the main keyboard would make a decent “Super HP-12c Platinum”—even with only 290 bytes of program memory. Now somebody tell me that that, if it already existed, isn’t a business programmable that only I would want.