find the "seven" differences

[Claudio L.]

(08-16-2016 11:00 AM)AVL Wrote:  What I find really amusing is how all the HP-50G worshippers tend to forget how bad the HP-50G was back in the days of it's launch (when it still was called the HP-49G+). It crashed literally every ten minutes, the keyboard failed to respond to every third keystroke, and the CAS was a joke compared to that of the TI-89 (Derive!). It took a new hardware with new colors and new keyboard internals, a name change and countless firmware upgrades to correct most of the bugs.

I could agree with most of the above, except:
a) The CAS hardly changed since launch (other than bugfixes), so if it was a joke to you then, it should still be a joke today.
b) Countless firmware upgrades. There weren't that many (don't count the unofficial ones). The Prime has had in 3 years twice as many firmware updates as the 49G+/50g combined (which is both a good thing and a bad thing).
ROM 2.09 for the 50g came out 3 years after the 49G+ launched and it was very stable. 2.15 came out after 3 years of silence, with only a few things done: the bulk of the bug fixes were done before 2.09. The Prime was launched 3 years ago, so it should be at a similar maturity point as rom 2.09.

(08-16-2016 11:00 AM)AVL Wrote:  Not that it was a difficult goal to achieve, but the HP Prime is doing much better in that respect. The hardware and build quality were much better from day one (that was easy) and the firmware became more stable in less time compared to that of the 49G+/50G...

The speed of development has more to do with the ROM being written in a more "human" language than Saturn assembler and sysRPL. Debugging code in those days required much more effort than today, and yet I think both Prime and 50g evolved in similar time frames.