NEW: HP 15C Collectors Edition

[ajay_m]

On my phone I have Thomas Okken's amazing Free 42 and I also purchased his Plus 42 version and these I think are the best emulations to have because it doesn't entirely make sense to me to emulate more restricted displays (like 7 segment) displays on a vastly more powerful device, whereas an actual hardware device like the 15C CE obviously you're replicating the original product design and tradeoffs like battery life, etc.

Oddly enough the keybounce issue seems to have improved significantly since I first got the device, which is probably because the contacts are bedded in a bit, although I'd expect if I left it in a drawer for a few weeks the problem would worsen though I don't know what materials are used in the switches; you'd hope gold-plated contact surfaces, as HP probably would have chosen, but who knows. I was incredibly impressed that the HP11C I purchased, which must have sat largely idle for 40 years, worked perfectly with all buttons immediately, this is an incredible tribute to HP's engineering.

It was fascinating reading through William Kahan's interview, especially the section on his work for HP and the evolution of the 15C - I plan to use the discussion on 'solve' as a example to our engineers/product managers as to how product features don't always come from direct customer demand; as Kahan pointed out, internally HP's engineers started using the prototype calculator to solve their own electrical design problems, proving Kahan's belief that the feature would be valuable.

If anyone from Moravia is lurking here, may I make a customer suggestion. You have that POGO socket. Imagine a low-profile widget that plugged into this with a bluetooth transceiver. You could then have software on a PC to upload and download programs to the calculator. I assume there's power on that connector but I don't know the details. Just a thought, anyway.... I'd pay good money for one of these....

Also wouldn't mind an extra flag that was set for 'precision loss'. I spent an interesting hour or so the other day implementing the Collatz Conjecture, and for the larger Wikipedia test cases, the cycle counts are wrong presumably because the integer values exceed 10 digits during evaluation; it would be very useful to be able to pick this up programmatically rather than return wrong answers. Mr Kahan would approve