Life span of an HP Calculator

[Garth Wilson]

(09-13-2024 06:24 PM)John Garza (3665) Wrote:  As Geoff astutely mentioned, marketing plays a huge role in most companies.  However, I believe the engineers at HP in the early days had more of a say than is typical in most companies.  So some cost saving moves were avoided in favor of higher quality (and therefore longer lifespans).

My first programmable was the TI-58c, in December 1981.  My resources were limited, and a calculator's price at the time represented a lot of hours' work's pay.  I collected all the information I could at the time, and although I drooled over the HP's, I looked at the size of the projects I wanted to do, and TI offered the memory I wanted for a price I felt I could pay, unlike HP.  I presented my logic to KeithB who was using an earlier TI programmable (SR-56?), and he said he was holding out for when he could afford the best, the HP-41cv at the time, while going to school full time and working a few hours a week in a hardware store.  Delay notwithstanding, he made the better decision.  I eventually went the HP route too, but it took more experiences to convince me I should.  And now, besides the vastly superior capabilities of the 41, there's the fact that my TI's all have major problems (and keyboards are not one of them).

Geoff Wrote:This all comes down to a new calculator with increasing power every few years. Marketing wants you to purchase a new one and the engineers (initially) wanted them to last and last and last.

The marketing people need to understand that their target market, which in this case is engineers and other technical people, don't think like marketing people.  We buy something like the HP-41cx in the 1980's, read the manuals cover to cover (and don't lose them), get other materials on it like Mier-Jȩdrezejowicz's 1.5"-thick book "Extend Your HP-41" and read it cover to cover, buy other modules and accessories (my own collection dramatically dwarfing the initial price of the bare 41), spend time writing programs for our particular applications, etc., making a huge time investment on something we expect to use for many years.  Technology will keep moving; but we can't afford to start over every few years and make this kind of time investment, even overlapping, and translating and moving our frequently used programs to another platform (especially one that won't last), when familiarity and other fruits of our investment are more valuable to us than the shiny new technology the marketing people want to dangle in front of us.  Now, nearly 40 years after I bought my first 41, brilliant engineers and programmers on this forum are still introducing new things for it.  That doesn't mean faster and more-powerful computers don't have their place.  Of course they do.  The application is different though.  I still use my 41 every day, but the programs max out at about 300 bytes (and are usually less, albeit that the 41 makes very efficient use of user program memory with merged instructions and with the functions in the vast array of modules available today), and although it is slow-running, the time saved developing a custom program on a familiar platform may be more important.

74254 Wrote:Modern things/gadgets are not made to last. The manufacturers want it to break and have you buy new stuff to keep their revenue going.

A supplier gets one chance with me.  If their product doesn't last, I won't buy from them again.  I mentioned having multiple TI's, but that none of them fully work now.  Only one was new though, and the failures on all of them started after I acquired the last one.