Gauging interest in a DM48 or DM50?

[c3d]

(10-02-2024 02:14 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(10-01-2024 09:40 PM)c3d Wrote:  [snip

I'll try to represent them fairly, but I do not speak for them, this comment is only based on earlier discussions with them.

First, SwissMicros does something which is very smart, which is to focus on a specific niche market. Their current niche is HP calculator enthusiasts, and the way they approach it is by building calculators that faithfully emulate existing HP models. While they can improve slightly, e.g. with larger and better screens, running faster, showing multiple stack levels, or including a built-in help viewer, the basic rule is that the existing HP manuals should apply just as well to the corresponding DM model. This goes all the way down to exact placement key and labelling, or simulating printing.

They only deviated once from this philosophy, and I believe they see that as a disaster. They worked with the WP43 team to try and bring a non-HP calculator, albeit one that was clearly "in the spirit of" RPN calculators. Prototypes of the calculator were built, but then there was a dispute. I was not part of that dispute, so I can only report hearsay, but my understanding is that the creator of the WP43 project and the SwissMicros team could not come to an agreement regarding who would own the really impressive user manual. In any case, my impression is that SwissMicros derived all the wrong lessons from that, namely that working with an "external R&D department" was dangerous, and that they'd better stick to the known evils of existing HP calculators.
[snip]

Your speculation on what happened is just that, speculation, and is based on incomplete information, much of which isn't public. Please feel free to share your own opinions and conclusions here, but don't try to represent others actions and/or conclusions as that usually, as it does here, misleads people to believe things that are not so.

I believe I made it clear what was hearsay.

What is not speculation is my own interactions with SwissMicros, which have been somewhat bruising.

It is not speculation that the initial reaction was enthusiastic, and that I got the cold shoulder 6 months later. It is not speculation that this change of heart immediately followed the WP43 fallout, nor is it speculation that Michael directly referred to these events as the reason SwissMicros wanted to have full control over their software. It is not speculation that Michael told me that I should have asked for one more row of keys as an excuse, when even much simpler asks had all been repeatedly rejected. It is not speculation that Michael told me they wanted perfect compatibility and were not interested in something that was not faithful to the corresponding HP model. It is not speculation that I mentioned Numworks repeatedly to Michael to show there was a path to success through innovation, only to be accused of "threatening" SwissMicros by some third party who Michael had forwarded my private e-mail to. It is not speculation that I held back on releasing an iOS app that had been working for more than a year because I wanted to give SwissMicros a chance to be the first commercial release of DB48x.

In short, I am the very best person to have an opinion on why SwissMicros does not offer DB48x as an option. I was at the center of these discussions, no one else, and I have the emails to remind me of how painful this was.

Quote:Regarding model naming, prefix letters, etc. there are cases to be made for and against all of the choices mentioned above, and all are as valid or invalid as various opinions about them are.

A related observation is the C47 project, which uses nomenclature completely unrelated to any prior model or series, currently likely has more users than all other 3rd-party projects combined, so the name itself is clearly not the key criteria.

This project has a very long history, though. As you certainly know, the lineage is:

• WP34S, based on HP hardware, and where the naming convention was a reference to the HP32, skipping HP33 that already existed, and where WP were the initials of the designers (Walter Bonin and Paul Dale), much like HP or DM.
• WP43, designed for SwissMicros hardware, which I would argue was a reference to HP42.
• C43 was a friendly fork that mostly changed the key layout for compatibility, hence the "C".
• C47 was a renaming of C43 with changes in the user interface that were more than skin deep. By the time this name finally appeared, years later, there was an installed base already.
  

So the argument that the name does not matter seems to be ignoring quite a bit of context. I actually wonder if "the C47 project [...] currently likely has more users than all other 3rd-party projects combined" remains true if you take the iOS version of DB48x into account. After all, the main DB48x discussion thread is in the top-10 on this forum in number of responses (320 responses), aka user engagement, and the only active one in the top-10 (i.e. with responses within the last 6 months), with 4874 additional views in the past 8 days.

Regarding naming conventions, DB48x follows more or less the same established logic used by DM42 or WP43S, except that:

• I chose DB for Dave and Bill to honour Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, instead of using my own initials.
• I used 48 and 50 instead of 51 because the intent is to be source compatible with these models. One can argue that I should have used DB51X and DB52X, but I don't regret the choice, because here too I want to pay homage to the original design.
  

Ultimately, I am the one choosing the name for the project ;-) and the question in this thread is specifically about whether there would be an interest in a DM42n with DB48x key layout at the factory and officially released binaries preinstalled, which, apart from "doing nothing", is genuinely the smallest effort I can think of on the part of SwissMicros. Discussions about the name are bike shedding ;-)