The sentence "in the old days calculators were released at faster pace" is unfair

[pier4r]

This from the nice thread that one can found here: http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-6989.html (I also watched the youtube presentation)

rprosperi wrote:

Quote:he glory days indeed. The best part is TI and HP were bringing out several new machines every year! It's now 3+ years since the Prime's introduction and anywhere from 5 to 15 years since the significant TI models were introduced.

I think this sentence is unfair.

For the little that I know, in the years 1975-1990 there were more calculators released, but the majority of those was not as mature as the (flagship) calculators that come later. People did amazing things with the TI 56 or the HP 25 or 29C (and still they do amazing things) but it is also true that the average engineer would hit the limit of those machines quite quickly (in terms of algorithms that fit the memory or that run in reasonable time) .
Plus there was little competition from laptops at that time, so those systems were heavily used.

I would say that since the HP 48 series (and equivalent for TI) maturity has been reached. Sure, one can still create algorithms that would require a lot of computational power, ram or whatever, but for the purpose of a calculator, a HP 48 would be way enough (even more an hp 50g and a prime). For bigger stuff there would be a laptop/server/cluster available somewhere.

So I object the idea that new products have to be released frequently, if the existing one are capable enough to handle the majority of the needs of their users (for the purpose they were designed). Frequent releases of "overkill" devices won't be as useful as the releases of devices done before 1990 aside from consumerism (see smartphones).

Last but not least. Due to capability of the modern devices, I wouldn't really consider only a new calculator when a new hardware is released. A lot of value is brought bythe software, so if we consider the last software released for the prime, it was released only one year ago. The last version of new rpl is some weeks old. Free42 is some weeks old as well. I am not that updated on the TI side but I think they released a new nspire version in the last 1-2 years.

edit: some more proof reading.