Calculator test

[Steve Simpkin]

(12-08-2024 02:06 PM)Commie Wrote:  ...
Yeah, what I can't get my head around was this computational power was available way back in 1982 in the HP15C. It must have been ground breaking at the time.
...
Cheers
Darren

By most measures, the feature set and mathematical capabilities of the HP-15C were strongly determined by one person, Professor William Kahan.

As a consultant, Professor William Kahan assisted Hewlett Packard with the mathematical functions of a number of its calculators over the years. His work work on algorithms included improving the accuracy of functions, increasing the performance of complex functions and adding to the feature-set of many HP models including the Solver and Integration functions. As an interesting side note, Professor Kahan was instrumental in the development of the original HP-15C and its feature set. From the 2005 oral history listed below:

“Well, we could go on now with more of the Hewlett-Packard stuff because I had another ambition: the HP-15C. That was my ambition. I wanted to have a calculator that could be used by practically all engineering and most science students. And I wanted that calculator to be able to do all the math they were going to use up to their sophomore year except for divs, grads, and curls because on a calculator, you can’t really display regions and things like that. But you could certainly do everything else. You could do an awful lot of circuit calculation. You’d be able to do an awful lot of the calculation for the distortion of elastic structures in civil and mechanical engineering. You’d be able to solve some of the differential equations in kinematics for simple cases. You’d be able to do complex variables cases, so you could plot various flows. You know, I had a fair idea of the things that they have to learn, you see, up into their sophomore year. And I said, “I wanted a calculator that they could do all that stuff.” That would mean that professors like me could give them problems that were simultaneously more realistic and less tedious. And at that time, there weren’t personal computers in large numbers. Personal computers were a hobby.“

More about the work Professor Kahan did concerning the HP-15C and why HP did not sell as many of them as it could have is in the following 2005 oral history. His history with the HP-15C starts on page 151. The HP-15C Collectors Edition (and DM15L) is also running the original 1982 HP-15C firmware code with slight patches to accommodate more memory.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jlg9EWQ...sp=sharing